


Waterloo Bridge

by ivorygates



Series: Waterloo'verse [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, BDSM, Beating, Daniverse, F/F, F/M, Fisting, Genderswap, Girl!Daniel, Knifeplay, M/M, Multi, Partner Betrayal, Porn With Plot, Rape/Non-con References, Threesome - F/M/M, Vaginal Fisting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:39:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 62,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Three months after he arrives in Colorado, the phone rings in the middle of the night..."</p>
<p>Cam's shakedown year at the SGC isn't what he expects.  A genderflipped re-imaging of Synecdochic's Eurydice'verse, specifically "A Valley of Dry Bones" and "Like Water, Lying".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waterloo Bridge

Three months after he arrives in Colorado, the phone rings in the middle of the night. It's the high irritating twitter of his cellphone on the nightstand beside the bed; the sound reminds him of a pissy schoolteacher trying to get his attention. _The SGC,_ he thinks, and thinking that is enough to drag him all the way awake. He snaps on the light and fumbles for the phone and just manages not to knock it off the nightstand. He flips it open.

"Mitchell."

"Cam? It's Sam. I'm sorry."

The sentence ought to go _'I'm sorry to wake you up at this hour'_ \-- he checks the clock, it's a little after two -- but it doesn't. It just stops there. "Sam?" he asks. He's worried now.

"I'm sorry," she says again. "Dani just called, and she's downtown, she needs somebody to go pick her up, and she called me and I--" There's a pause, a beat of silence, as if Sam's trying not to say something, or to find the right words. "I can't. You'll have to do it."

There's a lot here Sam isn't saying, but he's getting used to that. "Is she hurt?" he asks, and Sam laughs. She doesn't sound happy.

"I don't think so. I didn't ask. I'll give you the address. I'm sorry," she says again.

#

It's almost three by the time he gets to the address Sam gave him -- a bar downtown -- and that's time enough for him to wonder why Jackson didn't just call a cab.

The bar's closed, of course. All of downtown's shut up and dark. He spots her across the street and up the block, sitting on the bench at the bus stop. He pulls up -- he's not sure if the buses run this late, but they can spare him a minute if he's in the way -- and gets out of the car. Leaves it running, flashers on, just in case.

"Hey," he says, walking over to her. 

It's July, and so it's about as hot as Colorado Springs ever gets. The temperature drops sharply at night -- something Cam's still getting used to -- but that just means it's in the seventies right now, not the nineties. If she hadn't been right under a streetlight, she would have been hard to spot: black pants, black long-sleeved shirt. As he approaches, she looks up, moving as slowly as if she's underwater. 

"You're not Sam," she says after a long moment. She sounds perfectly sober if you don't listen to the actual words, but he knows (now) why she called for a ride. The woman is _blasted out of her skull._

"No," he says. "It's Cam. We work together." 

"Yes," she says patiently. "I know. You're Colonel Cameron Mitchell."

He stares down at her, and sees that her pupils are blown wide, even in the glare of the streetlight directly overhead, and he revises his question from _how much has she been drinking_ to _what the hell has she been smoking?_

"I'm going to take you home," he says, speaking slowly and firmly because Momma taught him a lot of good wise things but Daddy taught him how to talk to drunks. Said if he was going into the Air Force he'd best be learning how. It took him a few years to figure that one out.

"Are you?" she asks, and it's just freaky, because she doesn't sound drunk at all. Just everything's slowed down a good bit from normal, which means -- with Jackson -- about to the speed normal folks go at.

"Yes," Cam says patiently. "Come on. Let's go. You don't want to stay out here all night." Or maybe she does. How would he know? But she called for a ride and Sam sent him to fetch her and he'll worry about the rest of it later.

There's another time-delay while she thinks something over and then smiles. "It's my birthday," she announces.

He's been at the SGC since the tag-end of March, and _every possible joke_ about the Ori being the worst April Fool's Day joke _ever_ has been done, because Spencer died on April First. And you'd think that in the last three months somebody would have mentioned something. You'd think he'd have remembered, because he's seen her file, and it's got her birth date in it: July 8th. Today. Yesterday, actually, because right now it's the morning of July 9th. And while he's catching up to that, it comes to mind that Sam could have mentioned something, and then it occurs to him that _Sam_ could have celebrated Jackson's birthday, too, because she and Jackson have been friends -- close friends -- for the past eight years and just what the hell is up with the fact that Jackson's here -- alone -- and Sam called him to play taxi?

But he says, "Happy Birthday," and she laughs, and her head drops back, and for the first time Jackson actually looks drunk. He leans over to get an arm around her, get her to her feet, and her head whips up and around -- fast -- and she stares at him.

"No," she says. Just one word, but it makes him step back.

"Come on," he says again. "Let's get you home."

He stands there as she gets to her feet, ready to catch her if she falls, but she doesn't. She isn't so much unsteady as slow. At least he doesn't have to ask her where she lives: Sam told him that, too. _'Make sure you take her there,'_ she'd said, as if Cam might consider taking her anywhere else.

He follows her around to the passenger side of the car and opens the door for her, and she says something to him and he can't understand a word of it. From the tone, it's supposed to be funny, but he's not sure who the joke's on. She looks at him and sees he doesn't get it, and says something else by way of explanation, but since it's still in the same language, it isn't very helpful. She sighs, irritated, giving up.

"Sorry," he says. "Just English." He's not parading his rudimentary foreign language skills in front of a woman who speaks a couple dozen of them.

"It _was_ English," she says crossly. She slides down into the car -- a controlled fall -- and he closes the door.

Once they're both inside Cam debates whether it's worth the struggle-or-argument to get a seatbelt on her, but her place is fairly close. And if she's going to decide to puke, it might be worth leaving her unbelted for the chance of being able to get her out in time to save the upholstery. He drives slowly and cautiously, sneaking glances at her from time to time. She's slumped down in the seat, stretched out, and she seems to be asleep. He's never seen her like this. He's seen her in the middle of disaster and under torture and about to be killed, but not like this.

She's got a loft in a converted warehouse in a part of town that started out industrial and is on its way to artsy but hasn't gotten all the way there yet; still a rough neighborhood if you're out at this hour. As he pulls up and parks (he wonders where her car is; he wonders if she knows where her car is) he hears the wail of a night freight a block or so away, and the clickety sound of wheels on rails. It's a homely sound.

About the time he's thinking he's going to have to frisk her for her keys and carry her inside, she opens her eyes. "Mitchell," she says, and she sounds irritated and a lot closer to sober than she did half-an-hour ago.

"That's right," he says, because he's not quite sure how this conversation should go. At least it seems to be taking place in English.

While he's still unbuckling his seat belt she's opened the door on her side and levered herself out. He gets out and closes his door and she's frowning at him again. "You can go," she says.

"I'd better see you to your door," he answers, because he knows damned well she can't possibly be sober. And the last thing he wants is to be called in a couple of hours to come and get her out of jail if she goes wandering off and ... gets into trouble. 

"Sam took me home," she says, and she sounds wistful, and Cam wonders what the hell he doesn't know, and if it would help at all if he did. She turns away, walking slowly and carefully toward the door of the building. By the time he catches up to her she's standing in front of the door, one hand braced on the brick wall, the other hand digging through her pockets for her keys. For a while he's afraid she isn't going to find them (because he's never known a woman who kept her keys in her pockets and maybe they aren't there at all), but she finally pulls them out. He'd take them and open the door himself, but he's a little worried about what she might do if he tried.

She moves slow enough to drive him half crazy watching, but every movement is controlled, and finally she gets the key into the lock and opens the door. He thinks she'd probably like to slam the door in his face, but he moves fast enough to get a hand on it and hold it open and follow her inside.

There are a lot of stairs, and she doesn't take them fast. When they finally get where she's going -- top floor -- they go through the same thing again -- two locks this time -- and Cam thinks he'll be given his marching orders again, and he's not quite sure what he thinks about that -- although if she can walk and unlock doors it's probably okay to leave her alone -- but this time when she gets the door unlocked she just walks in, leaving it hanging open. So he follows her in and closes the door and locks it. 

He's never been in her apartment before. It doesn't really look anything like he expects. If he'd thought about it, he supposes he expected something that would look like an extension of her office at the SGC -- bleak, grey, industrial -- but the only way it looks like that is that both are crammed with books and ... things. One of the walls is brick; the others are painted a deep green. There are Oriental rugs on the floor. Nice furniture. Even a piano. Does she play? It seems unlikely. And he doesn't see her anywhere, although she'd been moving slow enough a moment ago.

He hears sounds and follows them.

She's in the kitchen, making coffee, still with the same terribly-precise controlled movements, and he thinks about the Family Shame, a distant cousin on his Daddy's side, who'd never been sober a day in his adult life, but who never really much looked under the influence until he passed out cold, and Cam thinks that people don't get this good managing themselves drunk unless they do a lot of drinking and he has a sudden horrified worry that he's never seen Jackson sober. But of course he has. They spend half their time trying to save the world and the other half being tested and screened to make sure that the Stargate hasn't _done something_ to them (Sam was happy to tell him, just before he stepped through it the first time, that they still really weren't sure how it worked), and Jackson would never get away with drinking on the job. Even if she wanted to. Because the one thing Cam knows about Jackson by now (thinks he knows) is that she cares about her work.

He clears his throat -- softly, because he doesn't want to startle her. She slides the basket into the coffeemaker and flips the switch. "Yes?" she says.

"Plain water'll be better for you'n coffee," he says.

"Isn't there somewhere you need to be?" she asks.

"Not really, no," he answers.

"So this is part of your job description? Now that you've got the _band_ back together?"

"I want to--" he says, and stops, because by now he knows that any sentence that ends _take care of you_ isn't going to go down well. "Make sure you're okay," he finishes.

But apparently that's the wrong thing, too. "Why wouldn't I be?" she asks. "I've got you." She opens the refrigerator and takes out two one-liter bottles of water. Twists the caps off, gazing at him defiantly, and then chugs them both, one after the other, without even a pause for breath. "Satisfied?" she asks, tossing the empties into the recycling bin, then walks past him, out of the kitchen.

He watches the coffee stream down into the pot. Thinks he probably ought to think about leaving, but he's not quite sure Jackson's all right yet. And he figures the least she can do is buy him a cup of coffee. When it stops brewing, he hunts himself out a mug and pours. The coffee's black as motor oil. He looks around for something to cut it. 

There's sugar, but no milk. Not much of anything in her pantry, really. Beer, bottled water, a couple of bottles of Scotch. A few boxes of Pop-Tarts. The coffee's strong enough to make his mouth tingle, and he hates coffee without milk, but he drinks it anyway.

Fifteen minutes by his watch until she comes back. Hair damp and slicked back. Changed into sweat-pants and a sleeveless t-shirt. Barefoot. A little flushed, a little green. Her eyes glitter behind her glasses. "Glad to see you've made yourself at home," she says.

"I'm sorry, I should have--"

"For god's sake, Mitchell, I owe you a cup of coffee, at least." Her voice is flat and a little hoarse, and when she goes up on tip-toe to get herself a mug, the t-shirt rides up and he can see fading bruises along her back and ribs from their last mission. She was beaten.

She pours herself coffee. Dumps in enough sugar to make him wince. Drinks it down as if it isn't blistering hot. Takes a deep breath, holds it, and Cam knows she's wondering if the coffee's going to come right back up again, the way (he's pretty sure) the water did. But it doesn't, and she pours herself another cup. Dumps in more sugar. Leans against the counter, cradling the mug in her hands, and the surface of the coffee sparkles in the overhead lights because her hands are shaking just a little. Not sober yet, Cam knows, but right now, a very wide-awake drunk.

"Sam called you because she didn't want to come." Put that way it sounds ugly, maybe uglier than the truth is, and he doesn't want to answer, but he doesn't have to. She sighs, and closes her eyes, and tilts her head back. The kitchen lights aren't kind; she looks haggard.

"Why don't you get some sleep?" he says, although she hasn't taken well to any suggestion he's made yet.

She lowers her head and looks at him. Drinks. He knows she's about to say something, and every time she does he has the sense that the words are coming from a long way away, like the radio-lag you get when one of the 302s is way the hell out in the Big Empty.

"You are courteous, and brave, and reverent, and selfless, and a credit to the United States Air Force, and I am certain that as soon as you are gone I will take myself off to my bed and dream sweet dreams in the embrace of Morpheus." She pauses, as if she's just thought of something. "Morpheus and Thanatos were brothers, you know, but we're fairly sure that Thanatos died several thousand years ago, and we've never met Morpheus."

He's not quite sure how to unravel all of that, except that he knows, from the mission reports, that Thanatos was the _Goa'uld_ who once ruled Kelowna. Which makes at least part of the rest of it make sense. Overall, he's not sure whether or not she's insulting him. "So I should go so you can get some sleep?" he says.

"Or you can stay and fuck me. Your choice."

He hears the words, then he hears the _sense_ of the words, and he feels like he's been punched in the chest. "I think you ought to go to bed," he says, very quietly.

"Your choice," she says again. She sets her cup down on the counter. It's empty. "You can let yourself out." She walks out of the kitchen, back into the bedroom again, and he stands in the kitchen for a moment trying to make the words he's just heard go away (but they don't), and then he dumps the rest of his coffee in the sink and rinses out the two cups and sets them in the drainer to dry, and shuts off the coffeemaker, and goes to the front door to check to see if he _can_ go out and leave it locked. The bottom lock is a snap lock and the top lock is a dead-bolt, so he can, though he'd have to leave the dead bolt unlocked.

He can't quite make up his mind.

After a few minutes he goes back to the bedroom and looks in. The bedside light is on, and she's sprawled out, face down, across the bed but not in it, feet dangling, her glasses clutched in one outstretched hand. That's what decides him. If she was too drunk to make it all the way into the bed, she's going to have one hell of a hangover when she wakes up, and she'll need someone to be here. Besides, her car is God knows where, and she'll need a ride back to it. It's 0400 by now; the night is pretty well shot anyway. He walks around the bed and tries to ease her glasses out of her hand, but she's holding on to them too tightly, and he gives up. He walks back out into the kitchen and pours himself a fresh cup of coffee. Strong as it is, he'll probably be up until the day after tomorrow.

He goes back to the living room and settles down to wait. In the next several hours he does a little prowling around the apartment and a lot of staring at the ceiling. Discovers that Jackson apparently has no interest in popular reading and doesn't own a television set. Finds out that _somebody_ remembered her birthday, and that she wasn't too happy about it, because off in a corner near the front door there's the remains of something wrapped in bright birthday paper that looks like it's been stomped to death. He doesn't touch it. It's her business. Thinks about another cup of coffee, but as far as he can tell, there's only one bathroom and it's back through her bedroom, and he doesn't want to chance waking her. Thinks about calling Sam as soon as it's anywhere near a decent hour, but decides not to. It's Saturday, and somebody should get the chance to sleep in. Thinks about leaving, but the longer he stays, the harder it is to go.

Around 0900 he hears movement. Jackson comes padding out of her bedroom in a pair of plaid boxers and a grey Air Force t-shirt about a thousand times too big for her, hair wet from a shower and slicked straight back again. No glasses.

She stops and stares at him. "You're still here," she says.

He's been mulling it over in his mind, so he's got an answer ready for that one. "Thought you might need a lift back to your car."

She keeps on staring at him (or toward him; he really has no idea of how well she can see without her glasses) for a long moment. "It's downstairs," she says, in an 'any idiot should know that' tone of voice.

Cam gets to his feet, feeling like a fool. If he'd asked her last night, she probably could have told him that then. Or maybe not; he's rarely seen anybody that just plain _shit-faced_ who could still walk and talk. But Jackson seems to be one of the lucky ones. No particular hangover this morning that he can see. "Um," he says. "You mind if I-?" he asks, gesturing.

"Through there."

When he gets back from the bathroom, she's in the kitchen, making fresh coffee. "Breakfast?" she asks.

"You don't have anything here to make breakfast with," he says.

"I'll try to be more considerate of your needs in future," she says. She reaches into the cabinet and pulls out a box of Pop-Tarts. Tears it open, tears open the package, drops a pair of them into the toaster. "I used to keep bread but it kept turning green," she says, half to herself.

He's already begun (more than begun) to notice that it's hard to keep a proper larder in this job. Leave one day, expecting to be home that night, and it's a week later before you step through the Gate again. And he's only been here months, not years. "I ... Pop-Tarts are fine."

She gives him the first set when they bounce up -- even puts them on a plate for him. Strawberry. The frosted kind, which means they can do you serious injury if you try to eat them before they cool. The coffee's ready, and she takes down two mugs. "I probably have some powdered creamer," she says. "I used to keep it because--" she stops. "I used to keep it." She doesn't wait for an answer, but digs around in the back of her cupboards until she comes up with a plastic jar of Coffee Mate. She shakes it vigorously before setting it on the counter. He picks it up and pours some in. The coffee turns the color of polished maple. Ought to help a little.

The second set of Pop-Tarts are up. She lifts them out and sets them on a paper towel. Doctors her coffee -- nothing but sugar -- and drinks. "I should thank you for bringing me home last night," she says.

He'd like to say _'what are friends for?'_ except they aren't. And 'coworkers' doesn't really cover it either. 'Teammates' is accurate, but all evidence to the contrary, he's never felt that Jackson was a team player. "Not a problem," he says.

That gets him a faint smile, kind of like she's listening to something he can't hear. She's like that a lot. There are times when he thinks Jackson doesn't see _people_ at all. That she translates them all into something else and looks at that instead, and he's not sure what it could be, or how it looks, or how he measures up. He picks up one of the Pop-Tarts and bites into it. It's sweet and hot and just a little stale, but it gives the coffee in his stomach something to chew on, anyway, and even with creamer and sugar the coffee's still bitter. He thinks about it for a minute and decides that 'bitter' isn't exactly the right word, but he's not sure what is. He finishes the pastry in just a few bites. He thinks the coffee's either numbing his stomach or eating through it; he isn't hungry now.

She's breaking the crust off all around the edges of one of her Pop-Tarts. The filling shows through, bright and red. When she's done doing that, she breaks it in half. A wider band of red. The icing makes it difficult to break neatly. "I've never gotten drunk enough not to remember everything I do," she says conversationally.

There's about a three-second delay (afterward, he thinks of hand grenades) while what she says catches up to what she means (what she said last night, standing here) and suddenly he has to look anywhere but at her. "It's okay," he says awkwardly. "I'm not gonna--"

"Is it?" she asks, her words overriding the last of his, and she's moved from where she was, taken the few steps she needs to bring her right up close, and she takes the coffee cup out of his hand and sets it aside.

"No! I mean, I--"

"It's all right, Mitchell. Nobody's going to know."

He thinks: _I'll know_ and: _you'll know_ and he stares down at her and she's close enough that their bodies are brushing and it's very damned obvious that she hasn't got one single thing on under that t-shirt.

"Because this is something that I'd actually like to do, you know. And you can think of yourself as my birthday present if it makes you feel better. Or you can just say you've got no interest in me at all."

Her hand is on his chest, rubbing gently, lightly. And she's looking up at him and pressing slowly forward -- swaying a little, but not as if she's drunk; he doesn't think she's drunk; he thinks she's stone-cold sober now -- and he wants to say he hasn't got any interest, never did, never thought, never wondered-

But he can't.

"Can't," he says, and his voice is hoarse. He can feel himself getting hard and he knows she feels it too.

"Don't worry," she says, and her voice is almost a whisper. "They don't care about us. What we do. They never did." And she licks her lips, and he can feel _want_ radiating from her like a furnace, and he reaches out, as tentatively as if he were about to put his hand on a hot stove, and puts his hand on her back. And she rises up on her toes, sliding up along his body, and brushes his mouth with hers.

He rolls along his hip, along his shoulder, landing on his back against her refrigerator with a thud and she's moved right with him, both arms around his neck now. The shock of the impact makes him tighten his arms around her -- he's got both arms around her now -- and she's kissing him, wet and open-mouthed and hungry, as if _he's_ supposed to be breakfast, and he tastes sugar and coffee.

"Oh, God," he says, tearing his mouth free, and he's not sure whether it's a comment or a prayer. She puts her mouth on his neck, and he has a brief flash of not-quite-worry that she's going to do something that will leave a mark, but all she does is lick; a broad slow swipe up the side of his neck to his ear, and then she licks all along the edge of his ear and teethes on it gently. And he can be reasonable, he can be an officer and a gentleman, but dear God, there are _limits._ He reaches down and gets two handfuls of ass and pulls her against him and she breathes out a long sound that isn't quite a moan and rubs her face against his on the way back to his mouth.

He's not sure how long they spend kissing, but he's starting to get the feeling that just coming in his pants isn't completely out of the question, because he's kneading her ass like it's fucking _bread dough_ and she's rubbing against him like she's in heat. When she pushes back -- hands flat against his chest, tilting her head back to pull her mouth away from his -- he has one moment of thinking she's going to call a halt to things now, and it doesn't matter how much he didn't want this to start, he wants it to stop even less. But all she does is take a deep breath and say, "Bedroom," in the tone she uses when she's just figured out what the latest alien ruins used to be, and it takes him a few seconds to figure out that she's making a suggestion. Or giving an order. He's not sure. He's not sure he cares.

It's an effort to let go of her so they can move.

As soon as they're through the doorway she strips off. The t-shirt goes flying into a corner, and the boxers follow it. He stops and turns to stare, because while he's seen a good bit of Jackson's body over the last couple of months, this is the first time he's seen her really look _naked._

Fading bruises along her ribs. One on her thigh. Well, he's got some, too. A few scars here and there, old and faded. No one said this job was easy.

She walks over to him, and when she gets there, she starts unbuckling his belt. Unbuttoning his jeans. He thinks if she goes any farther with that there might be a problem, but she just starts pulling his t-shirt loose, and then he decides it's time to stop gawking like somebody who's never seen a naked woman before (but it's _Jackson_ ) and take matters into his own hands. So he shucks off the t-shirt and sits down on the edge of the bed to get his shoes off -- the covers are already folded back all the way to the foot, and that almost strikes him as odd, because he knows she slept on top of them last night. But he doesn't think about that for long, because while he's working on his shoes, she crawls up onto the bed behind him and starts running her fingertips lightly up and down his back. It's enough to keep him interested, because hey, there's a _naked woman back there._

He finally gets the shoes and socks off and stands up to shuck his jeans and boxers, and that's about the time he remembers that he got out of the habit of carrying rubbers in his wallet a good few months back. He's got some, sure, but they're in his go-bag, and that's in the car. "Do you -- I mean-?"

"I've got everything you need," she says, and she's stretched out on the bed, lying on her side, looking up at him, and the curtains are open -- this is the tallest building around, no need to worry about someone seeing in -- and the morning sunlight is shining through the window making everything look like it's been dipped in butter. So he kicks his pants away and climbs onto the bed.

Once he gets there (he isn't going to think about what he's doing, not here, not now) he puts his arms around her and they take up from where they left off in the kitchen. But it's more equitable now that they're both lying down. And he's not sure who's going to be on top, or what she'd like, what he should offer, but about the time he's really starting to wonder about that, she puts a hand on his hip and shoves, so he guesses he's going to be on the bottom, and that's okay, but he thinks (all things considered) it'll work out better if he does for her first, so he reaches for her to pull her toward him, up onto his chest, but she's already slithering away, down toward the foot of the bed.

And she bends over him and sucks him in, all the way down the back of her throat, and it's fast and unexpected and his hips come up off the bed but she doesn't pull back, just lets the motion drive his cock even further down her throat. It's like she's trying to swallow him alive. She pulls back, and slides down again, sucking, and he can feel her tongue against the shaft of his cock, and it's good, and oh, Sweet Jesus, where did she learn to give head like that? Because he thinks he might be about to explode, but she's got his balls in one hand, and she's tugging them away from his body, and the sensation is just enough to keep him on the edge without letting him go over.

He's thrashing and gasping -- trying to keep still, but he can't, he can't -- and then she pulls a little harder, and squeezes, and lifts her mouth off him at the same time, and the combination of pleasure and pain and cool air is enough to make his body stutter all over, but she's moving up and he doesn't have time to say _no_ or _wait_ or any other half-assed thing he might be thinking of saying, because she's kneeling over him, gripping his cock in her hand and angling it into her.

And she's tight and wet and hot and he feels her muscles clamp around him as she settles her weight across his hips, and he can barely think straight enough to remember, to realize, that there's no condom anywhere in sight. He puts his hands on her thighs, opens his mouth to protest, to negotiate, and she puts a finger against his lips.

"Shhh'h. It's all right, Mitchell. You're safe. I'm safe." She takes her fingers away and leans down to kiss him.

And he has to believe it's okay -- as she grinds down against him, as she sucks his tongue into her mouth -- and it all feels so good, so _simple,_ and he relaxes under her touch and lets himself go.

She straightens up and starts to move in earnest now. Stroking over his chest, lightly, with her fingers (her nails are cut so short he can't feel them) and rocking on him. He feels the clutch and flex of muscle in her thighs as she moves, and slides his hand up her thigh, wanting to touch her clit, her cunt, because this position doesn't really do it for most women and he's not sure how long he can last after the wind-up she's given him and it's hot and unexpected and first times are always fast and _oh Sweet Jesus Lord he's fucking Dr. Danielle Jackson of SG-1, the unit he's (technically) commanding._

But she grabs his wrist as soon as his hand starts to move and puts his hand back on her knee, so he guesses the answer is 'no.'

And then she starts talking.

He doesn't understand a word of it and wouldn't even if they weren't fucking. French? Sounds like. He wonders if it's good or bad that he doesn't know a word of the language. It sounds like she's lecturing him, but just what the hell would she be lecturing him about right now? He catches a word here and there that he thinks he recognizes. _Américain_ is American, right? He's not sure what else she's saying, though. It sounds pretty.

_Vous êtes un tel idiot que vous allez obtenir tous les nous avez tué un de de nos jours-_

He focuses on the sound of her voice, trying to last, trying not to grip her thighs hard enough to leave more bruises, trying not to come, and the only change in her voice is the slight breathlessness caused by the exertion of fucking and talking at the same time and this is -- oh, _Christ_ \-- like every demented porno fantasy anybody's ever had about being screwed into oblivion by the nympho French teacher and he _won't think that about her._

_Porte des étoiles... serpent-têtes ... dieux faux... la guerre a été censée être excédent mais elle continue pour toujours..._

"Oh, God. Oh, baby. _Baby._ Come on. _Please--"_

He's not sure what he can't bear; what she's doing to him with her body or what she's doing to him with her voice, and he can't stand it, can't wait, can't hold back, and he tries again to touch her and she takes his hands and holds them in place against her thighs and works herself on him hard and fast but _at least she's stopped talking._ And he comes, moaning, thinking: _this is what she wants this is what she wants this is what she wants-_

Then nothing.

Empty. Spent. Drained.

He barely feels her move. The bed shifts a little as she climbs off it, but not much. He's half-asleep (too far under to speak) when he feels warm wetness at his groin. Washcloth. She's cleaning him up. A brush of fingers against his cheek. He feels the sheet settle over him.

Then he's gone.

#

When he wakes up, he can tell by the light that it's afternoon. He sits up, looking around at the unfamiliar bedroom, and for a moment he has no idea at all of how he got here. Then he does.

Jackson.

And he feels like he's shattered all of the Commandments, including the unlikely one about sculpting idols. He gets up and heads for the bathroom, grabbing his shorts on the way.

There's a stack of towels laid out, and a toothbrush -- still in its box -- on top of them. Obvious invitation to shower and clean up if he likes. No razor, though, and he's got one in his go-bag, but he has no idea whether if he goes out he'll be let back in, so ... shower first. The shower stall is big enough to wash a horse in, and has more bells and whistles than he's seen outside of his last ride, but he figures it out. Adjusts the spray to needle-sharp, shucks his boxers, and takes a long hot one. It clears his head a little, but it doesn't solve anything. He comes out, towels off, brushes his teeth, finds the rest of his clothes, gets dressed. Part of him hopes she's found some place else to be so he doesn't have to face her immediately, but that won't solve anything either, because they'll need to see each other at work on Monday, and if anything's going to be awkward, it'll be a lot better to take care of it here. Away from the Mountain. 

When he walks out into the living room she's sitting on the couch reading a book, bare feet propped up on the coffee table. Sweatpants and a t-shirt again. "There's pizza in the kitchen," she says, not looking up. "I got you plain cheese. I don't know what you like. Coffee's fresh. Or there's beer."

He waits a few seconds, but she still doesn't look up, so he goes into the kitchen. There are two pizza boxes there, balanced on the stove. He opens the top one. The pizza's half gone. It looks like it's got anchovies, and he's not sure what else, but they don't look like things that belong on a pizza. He shuffles it for the box underneath. A large plain cheese pizza. He pulls out two slices and folds them over. Just about room temperature, but cold pizza isn't bad.

He doesn't want to venture on Jackson's coffee again, and a beer sounds real good right now, but he doesn't want to have to drive right on top of one, and he doesn't want to assume he'll be staying, so he settles for one of the bottles of water he saw in her refrigerator last night. He wolfs down about half his double-slice before figuring he can't hide out here in the kitchen forever. The two of them are going to have to talk. About this. About everything. So he grabs himself a makeshift napkin off the roll of paper towels and goes back out. She's still reading.

"Uh," he says. "Look." He's not sure (now) whether to call her 'Jackson' or 'Dani' or 'Danielle' or just follow Teal'c's lead and go with 'Danielle Jackson,' which ought to cover everything. "Uh," he says again. "About ... this morning."

And she finally looks up at him, and she smiles, and it's actually a nice smile, and he hasn't seen too many of those on her face, no matter who she's looking at. "It's all right, Mitchell. No consequences. It can all stay right here in the room. I won't tell. And you won't tell."

He's not sure if that's what he wants. He shakes his head, trying to make his thoughts settle out into some kind of sense.

"It's the best thing." She pats the couch, and he sits down. "Confessing will just annoy Landry and upset Sam. And it's not as if it's made any difference."

"It didn't make a difference to you?" he asks. He isn't sure whether to feel hurt or relieved.

"Of course it did," she says patiently, in the same mild tone. "I liked it. But I don't want you to have to do anything you don't want to do. We do enough of that at work."

This is verging on being the longest non-work-related conversation he's had with Jackson _ever._ And ... that's just weird, because ... everybody he's talked to at the Mountain's said that SG-1 (the _old_ SG-1) used to hang out together off the clock all the time. And okay, he's the new guy, but he honestly can't imagine Jackson hanging out with _anybody._ And he thinks about the way she looked in the bedroom with the light gilding her, and he thinks about late nights and early mornings, and not having anyone to talk to who knows (can know) what it is he does now, and he thinks about the couple of times he picked up somebody in a bar here -- nice girls, but he couldn't _talk_ to them, and even if he could, could have told them everything, they wouldn't have understood.

"What if I want to do it again?" he asks.

"Then I suppose we will," she says. "You'll want to finish your pizza."

And he's hungry, so he does.

#

The second time they have sex is a couple of weeks after the first. It's at his apartment. The complex serves as transient housing for the military personnel in the area: he keeps promising himself he's going to look for a nicer place but he never has time. It's a Saturday, and he isn't doing much of anything. Feet up on the couch, watching ESPN. He isn't expecting the knock on the door. He _really_ isn't expecting Jackson to be on the other side of it when he opens it.

"Uh," he says.

She smiles faintly. "Nice to see you too. Sam asked me to pick up..." she frowns "...something."

"Oh, shoot." He'd borrowed a stack of DVDs from Sam last week and meant to drop them off with her at work on Friday. "You didn't drive all this way to pick them up?"

"I'm on my way home," she says.

"You went in to work today?" he asks, stepping back so she can enter.

"Didn't leave last night." She stands in the middle of his living room, regarding it the way he imagines she'd inspect an alien culture.

"Coffee?" he asks. "All I've got is instant, but--"

"Which isn't coffee," she finishes for him. She shakes her head; he's not sure whether it's an apology or not. "I don't know how you stay awake on that stuff."

"Maybe I get more sleep than you do."

"You probably do," she says. 

"I got beer and sweet tea," he offers.

"Beer's fine," she says, and he goes to get them both one. The DVDs are sitting in a stack on the pass-through between the kitchen and the living room; he indicates them, helplessly apologetic. He comes back with the beers, and they sit side-by-side on the couch, and it occurs to Cam abruptly that this is the first time he's been alone with Jackson (on Earth, outside the Mountain) since that day he took her (or she took him) to bed. (He started out calling her 'Jackson' on the job, and he realizes that he can't manage to turn her into _'Dani'_ inside his head, no matter how many times he hears Sam call her that.) She hasn't indicated in any way that she even _remembers_ it. And he thinks about the conversation they had that afternoon. Is she waiting for him to make the first move?

"Sam expecting you?" he asks.

"Some time before Monday," she says. And there's one, two, three beats of silence. "Were you planning on propositioning me?" she asks. "Or should I just finish my beer and leave?"

"Like to know if you've got a preference," he says, because it would be nice to _know._

"I always have a preference, Colonel Mitchell," she says. After a moment where he doesn't say anything -- because he's just a little tired of walking into Jackson's buzzsaw straight-lines -- she sighs. "We wouldn't be having this conversation if I didn't."

"So I'm guessing you'd rather stay?"

"For a while."

He has the feeling that there's another sentence underneath that one, and he wonders how long he'll have to be on SG-1 before he can hear it.

#

Neither of them finishes their beer: a few minutes later she gets up and walks off to his bedroom without another word. When he gets his brain in gear enough to follow her there, she's already starting to undress. The bruises are all gone. They've been lucky lately. There's nothing seductive about the way she undresses: it's obvious that her point is just to get her clothes off. But once she has, she walks back over to him, and it's equally clear that she expects him to kiss her.

There's something just a little _perverse,_ Cam thinks, about touching Jackson at all. Leaving aside the whole thorny question of what might-or-might-not be sexual harassment in Today's Air Force, he's never been afraid to touch Sam. Clap her on the shoulder, take her by the arm. Even pat her on the head to tease her, because they're teammates now, and old friends from back well before he was flying 302s and thought the most Top Secret thing Sam Carter did was build them. Doing the same things with _(to)_ Jackson -- even after they'd had sex -- is something Cam just can't imagine. It gives having her naked in his arms a certain extra zing that he can't quite decide whether he likes or not. Whatever touch-me-not rules she has, though, they seem to come off with her clothes, and eventually he stops worrying about it. Even more eventually, he decides that getting naked would be a damned good idea.

When he starts trying to get his hands in between them to fumble at his clothes, she backs away and turns to the bed. He gets a nice view of everything she's got to offer while she unmakes it, carefully folding all of the covers down to the foot and out of the way. By then he's half-undressed, but he takes another moment to stare while she crawls onto the bed on hands and knees, her back still to him. She looks back at him over her shoulder.

"If you took as long to gear up as you do to strip, we'd probably be in serious trouble," she says neutrally.

Well, his momma taught him to never keep a lady waiting, so he gets out of the rest of his things in a hurry; kicks off his shoes, and joins her in the bed. By the time he gets there, she's lying on her back. Waiting for him.

The first time they had sex, Jackson crashed into him like an irate linebacker. It's hard to believe this is the same woman, because this time she lets him call all the shots. They go back to kissing, and Cam keeps waiting to get slammed, and then he realizes that for some reason it isn't going to happen. And it makes him want to do for her, to make this _good_ for her. He works his way down her body, tonguing and sucking at all the soft sensitive places. She's a little quiet, but maybe that's her way; he doesn't know yet. He kisses her stomach, feeling the hardness beneath the soft, and waits for her to stop him if she's going to. Some women will. But Jackson just draws her knees up and spreads them wide; a clear invitation. He kisses his way on down, not hurrying.

He dips his tongue into her; a first exploratory lick. She cocks her hips up at him encouragingly and he nuzzles at her cunt. Sucks at her clit then licks around it; slides his tongue into her as far as he can; laps at her clit with long broad swipes. He's not sure what she likes. Every woman's different. And normally he'd expect to get a little something in the way of _driving directions,_ but he doesn't. But about the time he's wondering if he'd better just _pull over and ask,_ he feels her hand settle gently on the top of his head, so he figures he should just keep going along the way he is. He slides one arm under her thigh; she lifts it readily, cocks her knee over his shoulder and rests her heel gently against his back. He likes that, because it will give him more of a clue to what she's feeling. He moves his other hand forward, slowly, and strokes a finger up into her. Silky and wet.

He likes doing this. He hears guys bitch about it all the time, like it's some kind of chore, but Jesus, having your mouth full of woman, where's the downside? And it's not even a strain, not like having a faceful of cock. A comparison Cam is forfuckingdamnedsure not going to make in any company he can ever imagine being in.

He rolls his hips against the sheets. It feels good. Even better, thinking of what's to come. There are times when he thinks that this -- being like this -- has got to be the best thing ever. He slips two fingers into her, rocking them back and forth, rubbing at her with his knuckles, feeling the way the lips of her cunt suck and pull at his fingers like a kiss. Lifts his mouth off and blows over the wet flesh gently, and as he does, he sneaks a glance up toward the top of the bed. Her hand tightens in his hair as he moves, but she doesn't push at him. Her other arm is wrapped around the top of her head, and her face is turned toward it, almost as if she's asleep. _Beautiful,_ Cam thinks, and lowers his head again. The fingers in his hair relax. 

It takes a long time for him to coax her into coming, and he doesn’t begrudge one moment of it; it’s good to touch, to begin to learn what gives her pleasure. When she does come, it's in silence; Cam only senses it by the sudden clamping tension, the way her muscles go hard and her hips tilt as she bears down, the way her heel digs into his shoulder. There's no sound at all.

When she relaxes again he shifts up just enough to rest his head on her stomach and lets her leg slip down off his shoulder. She strokes his hair. "Your turn," she says, and she sounds maybe a little looser and more unwound than he's heard her lately, and he's glad of that. But when he gets himself untangled and sits up, going for the drawer in the bedside table where he keeps a bachelor's necessities, she rolls over quickly and puts a hand on his wrist.

"No," she says. "I don't like them."

"Not the kind of fire you want to play around with," he says quietly, because they got lucky once, and he knows implants are mandatory for the women on the Teams, but that doesn't cover all the rest of it. And implants fail.

"You should do more reading," she says, which doesn't make a lot of sense to him, but she lets go of his wrist and rolls onto her back again. He doesn't dawdle getting himself safed. He suspects she might get impatient.

He settles in between her thighs again and she puts a hand up, and he realizes his tags are swinging forward because he's up on his knees. He's about to reach up, to take them off, but she shakes her head. And he smiles down at her and leans forward and glides into her, soft and hot and sweet. When he does, she curls up, arms going around him, and kisses him, sucking at his mouth as if she's trying to taste herself there. His tags are trapped safely between them now; nobody's in any danger of getting smacked. And she kisses him until he's running out of air, until it's too much, until he's got to _move,_ and when he does she makes a soft pleased sound and strokes his back.

"Tell me what you like," he says. He wants to take his time. Make it good. It's not that he's trying to show off, or prove himself in any way (any more than he is, really, to all of them, every waking minute), it's just that he'd like there to be some good things in her life. He doesn't know whether there are or not, really. But she was alone on her birthday, and he still thinks that's odd. She looks at him, and smiles, and answers. But the words aren't English.

"I don't--" he says, but just then she plants her feet firmly on the bed and _lifts._ Taking all of her weight on her shoulders, and -- for just a moment -- all of his, too. The movement rocks him forward, thrusts him deep inside her, he's grinding into her, bone against bone, and he feels her cunt squeeze around him. Before he can really process what's going on, she lets her hips drop to the bed again, and while he’s scrabbling ungracefully to catch his weight on knees and elbows instead of just _knocking her flat,_ she hitches up and wraps her thighs around his waist, tucks her heels against his back, and reaches down and grabs his ass with both hands, kneading and squeezing and grinding him against her like he’s the _best toy ever._ Her eyes are closed, and it's like she's listening, and any hope of slow and gentle is pretty much heading right out the window (and so much for good intentions), because the lights are going off behind his eyes and right now the only thing Cam can imagine doing is _fucking her through the mattress._

He pulls back and thrusts, and she huffs out air, head tilted back, still looking pleased and faintly expectant, so he does it again. His tags drag across her chest every time he pushes in; he feels the tickle of the chain around his neck, and he has a sudden pornographic vision of her legs over his shoulders, of fucking her deep and hard and long, and it makes him gasp and groan. Things he doesn’t want to think about Jackson, about any woman, swirl beneath the surface of his mind.

But she just keeps _encouraging_ him, as if they’re in a race to the finish line, and he can barely think straight enough to hope to God she gets there too, because every time he tries to back off in any way -- slow down, see to her, change position -- she does something else that keeps him from being able to think about anything but coming. Normally he doesn't like having his nipples played with at all -- it's more annoying than erotic -- but at about the time he's making a last-ditch effort to pace himself, she gets a hand in between them, and her fingers over a nipple, and _twists._ And it ought to hurt, but there's just what feels like a bolt of white fire straight to his balls, and he groans, and rears back, and slides both hands under her ass and gets a good grip and pounds into her and the sounds that come out of his mouth aren't like anything he could ever have imagined making at all. 

Everything's drawn so tight he can't bear it for another minute, not another second; it's _want_ and _need_ and (when he tries to think about it later the closest he can come is) rage without anger, and when he comes he can't _breathe_ and it feels as if he's being battered, as if someone's hitting his chest from outside. He shudders and whimpers and groans and he can count each beat of his heart, and -- when it's over -- he wants to collapse anywhere but on top of her -- he's drained, exhausted, sweat-soaked and gasping -- but she pulls him down onto her and strokes his back as he breathes raggedly against her neck. It's several minutes before he can manage to collect himself enough to move, and he barely remembers to hold the rubber in place as he pulls himself free. It's an effort to drag himself to the side of the bed to toss it into the trash. All he really wants right now is half an hour's nap. He's a guy. Sue him.

"Was it good for you too?" he asks, flopping back onto the bed. She's sitting up, pulling up the sheet to cover them, and he can't see her face. He's not sure whether he's making a joke or asking a serious question -- he'd like to know, but he really wouldn't like to hear that the answer is 'no.' "I'm glad you enjoyed it," she replies. It's a long time -- a very long time -- before it occurs to him that this isn't an answer.

When she gets out of bed a few minutes later he's half-asleep; it takes him a long time to realize that she isn't just going to the bathroom. By the time he hauls himself out of bed, finds his shorts, and staggers into the living room, she's nearly dressed.

"Hey," he says. He's not quite sure whether to feel hurt or not.

She walks over to him -- barefoot -- and kisses him. Lingeringly, but without passion. "I said I'd only stay for a while," she says, stepping back. "I'm going to drop the DVDs off with Sam and then go home. You should go back to bed."

He wants to suggest that it's friendlier with two in the bed, but she's already dressed. _Maybe next time,_ he thinks. "See you?" he says.

"We work together," she says. "But yes. Here. Or at my place." She sits down to put on her shoes, then picks up her briefcase and the stack of DVDs. Cam barely gets to the door in time to close it behind her. The whole experience seems oddly ... unfinished ... somehow. He mulls over Jackson's parting words in his mind. It isn't finished, of course. They'll be doing this again.

#

It's the middle of the following week before he chases down the cryptic reference she made to _'doing more reading',_ and when he does, he really isn't sure whether to shit or go blind. It's buried in SG-1's Mission Reports, and while he got the Cliff's Notes Versions while he was at the Academy Hospital, he's getting the full-length versions now. And so in the middle of the following Wednesday, he comes across full details of what happened during the Foothold situation eight years ago when a _Goa'uld_ named Hathor came damned close to taking over Earth.

Jackson isn't worried about her implant failing because she doesn't need one.

#

When they meet up with the Priors, Jackson wants to argue theology. Or ethics. Or maybe it's philosophy. She told him once that their best point-of-approach to the followers of the Way of Origin was through the principle of _henotheism_ : all gods are equally real, but you choose to worship yours, and let other people worship theirs. Cam says it sounds like she's advocating paganism. Jackson says she doesn't believe in _any_ god, much less one that would preoccupy itself with the affairs of a small group of people on one planet out of all the Life in the universe. But the point here is to get the Ori to _stop._ And, preferably, to take their toys and go home afterwards.

Her plan isn't working very well. Nothing is. In fact, it would be hard to imagine how they could be doing any worse without actually losing the entire war, because -- so far -- they seem to be losing all the battles. The Ori send Priors to start converting half the known galaxy. The SGC can't stop them. The Jaffa start converting to Origin. The SGC can't stop that either. The Priors build a Supergate big enough to send ships through, and it isn't bound by the 38-Minute Rule. They do manage to blow it up -- after they helped set it up in the first place -- but it's only a matter of time until another one's built that they don't catch in time.

If the Ori weren't enough trouble, there are still a few _Goa'uld_ out there making trouble, and all those guys the _Goa'uld_ kept pruned back are making hay -- or kassa -- while the sun shines, so they've got the Lucian Alliance underfoot too. Jackson's quiet and sullen and Sam's quiet and determined and Teal'c's just quiet, and all of that worries Cam, because from everything everybody's said, the fight against the _Goa'uld_ wasn't exactly a _picnic,_ but this is a lot worse. He and Jackson settle into a fairly dependable routine pretty quickly. Her place or his almost every weekend they're on Earth.

#

It takes him longer than he expects to figure out what she likes. Rough. Rougher, maybe, than he really wants to go; they compromise. She likes the feeling of weight; that's one of the places they compromise, because Cam isn't really used to getting his partner in a full-body press, before, during, or after sex. She won't come out and _tell_ him what she likes; that's the odd thing. He can't imagine that she doesn't know. It's not that she's ever been well, the Mountain bicycle, but everyone knows about the affair with Dr. Rothman (the late Dr. Rothman). And from the way Sam doesn't say the things she doesn't say when he asks her a few cautious questions about Jackson's social life, Cam suspects something closer to home. Never yet a good time to ask _her_ about it. Besides, it's something he suspects he may not actually want to know.

But one Saturday they're fooling around in bed -- her face-down in the mattress, him pressed against her back, knees between her thighs, and they're on their way there -- eventually -- to what she likes, slow and rough and heavy, and he slides his hand over her ass, between her cheeks, intending to slip his fingers into her from behind. Foreplay.

And she stiffens all over, jerking like she's been shocked, and Cam's momma didn't raise no fools, so he stops sliding his hand forward and slides back. Rubs the pads of his fingers over her back door, and she puts her head all the way down, ducking in, and arches up. She could lift him off the bed if she put her mind to it. She's stronger than she looks.

He presses in -- just a little -- and she growls. Encouragement. He hasn't met that many women who liked assplay, but then, hell, he hasn't met that many women like Jackson, period.

"A'right, baby, a'right." He leans further over and whispers in her ear, because she can get damned impatient in bed, and when she's impatient, she bites. "I'll make it good for you."

He puts a hand on the nape of her neck to hold her where she is, makes a long arm and fumbles in the bedside drawer for lube. He's got a tube of K-Y in there; not the easiest thing to get open one handed, but he manages. It isn't the best lube in the world, really, but somehow it's what he's gotten used to using. He squeezes the tube until it oozes onto his fingers. Good enough to start with. Swipes his fingers over her asscrack and then eases a finger in, and she makes a sound he's _never_ heard out of her in bed before and she's trying to get her knees under her, trying to come up off the bed at him. And he squeezes her neck -- hard -- and says, "Down," in a voice he hardly recognizes, and pulls out, and goes back in with two fingers. Pulling. Twisting.

She whines, deep in her throat, and slides flat against the sheets, but he doesn't let go, because she's played him false in bed before. When he thinks he can, he goes back in with three fingers, all the way to the base of his knuckles, and she's clutching at the edge of the mattress, elbows under her, and he knows that the instant he takes his hand off her neck she'll be up and pushing back. And they've been fucking for months, and he's _never_ gotten this kind of reaction out of her before, and if this is what she's wanted all along, why the hell didn't she _say_ so? He'll never understand women, and Jackson is in a class by herself.

He slides his hand out of her -- reaching for the tube again -- and she _wails,_ sounding angry and despairing and lost. "Easy, baby, easy," he says, even though he gets the feeling he's talking to himself here. He slicks himself up one-handed, wishing he dared to let go. In a minute. And then he presses against her, pushing in -- hasn't done this for a while and he never thought he'd be doing it here -- and he can feel her body shaking under the hand he has on her, tremors like a high fever, and he slides that hand down her back, digging his nails in, the way she likes, and about the time it gets between her shoulder blades the head of his cock has slipped inside and it's heat and pressure and God, he's _missed_ this, and he's bearing down, sliding home, and she's pushing back, slow steady weight, and he grips her hips with both hands, dragging her the rest of the way to her knees, and he begins to move.

And it's just... tight and soft and she won't hold still, won't let him set a rhythm, and somebody's going to get hurt here, so he lets go of one hip (wide and deep and different) and smacks her thigh, hard enough to leave a mark, and she shudders all over (choked cry of encouragement, low and guttural), like she was _waiting_ for him to do that (and he knows she always is, but he can't), and settles, going still, dropping down to her forearms, bracing herself, letting him move, find a rhythm, _thrust._

And he isn't wearing a condom, got out of the habit of keeping them here a while back (she hates the things anyway) so there's no way he can switch off in the middle; he's going to have to get her off this way. He reaches around to where the action is, palming her, rubbing; she's as wet as if she's already come, but he doesn't think she has. When she's close, when she comes, she swears at him in languages he doesn't know, languages from half a world away and another lifetime. He thinks it's swearing, anyway. And she hasn't started talking yet. Might not, this time, unless you count _speaking in tongues,_ because whatever this is to her, it's the right thing (why not tell him? why not ask?) and he palms her once again and then drags his fingers up and finds the small slick rigid flesh of her clit and starts to rub.

And she clutches the pillow against her face, and he hears her howl into it, open-throated, and the sound crawls right down his spine and sets his cock on fire; he digs the fingers of one hand into one hip and braces the inside of his other arm against her other hip, pulling almost all the way out, sliding back all the way, his hips jarring against her ass. And he wants to last, wants to take her apart, wants to break her softly again and again, so he leans forward, covering her back, making her take more of his weight, and takes his hand off her hip and braces it against the mattress, changing the angle, changing the stroke.

And now his other hand is freed up to work her, for as long as he can split his concentration, and he slides it back and in, hooking his fingers up under the jut of bone, three fingers, and he thinks he could do four, could do his whole _hand,_ but the angle's wrong and it's not the kind of thing to do when you can't give your full mind to it, but he's got her pinned now, taking just enough of his own weight to give him control, and he can feel every breath she takes, and every exhalation is a rising moan, like she's asking, like she's _begging..._

No words this time, no words at all, and he's got three fingers in her and he's whipping the fat web of flesh at the base of his thumb back and forth against her clit, but he feels her shudder all over, he feels her come, hears the sudden shocking silence (like a blow) as she sets her jaw and holds her breath (and who taught her that? what bed did she learn that in?) and every muscle tenses as her body jerks, clutching him where he's thrust deep into her, and of all the things here today, that's the one that's almost familiar. And he doesn't stop, because he knows (from experience) that she'll come again -- harder -- if he just keeps going, and of all the things they've done in bed (his bed, her bed) it's the thing she (for some reason) tries to avoid. Today he isn't giving her a choice.

He pulls his hand back just enough to set the heel of his palm on her belly just above that ridge of bone and presses his fingers (four fingers) through the folds of fragile swollen tender sensitive flesh, fingers slick with her come, and he knows just where to touch her; he's known that for a while. He rubs his middle finger over and around her clit, chasing it through the folds of flesh. She throws her head back, dragging in a deep ragged lungful of air, and when she breathes out, the sound is soft, almost plaintive. She's trying to push up onto her hands, to bear him up, to push him back, but she's shaking too hard to manage it.

Her second time is quick. Good, because he's getting close. And this time, when she comes, he hears every sound. Sobbing shuddering inhales, and gasps, and catches, and he doesn't realize just how close he is until he hears her, but he drops down to his elbow -- he has to get close to her, he _needs_ to get close to her -- and he presses his fingers against her clit, into her cunt, and he grinds his hips into her ass, trying to get farther into her than he possibly can, and he lays himself along her back and he listens to her sob and feels her clutch and shake and he sets his teeth into her flesh between shoulder and neck and he comes until there's nothing left.

It's a while after that before he's up to taking stock of the situation. Lying stretched out full-length on top of her, his chin hooked over her shoulder, one arm trapped beneath her. She's got her head turned to the side, facing away from him; probably the only way she can breathe right now. Maybe when his brain is working a little better he can make up his mind whether to file this one under 'good', 'bad', or 'great' sex. First order of business is to get the two of them untangled and his cock out of her ass. Well, _second._ First is to see if he can _ever move again._

He starts to shift -- tentatively; going to need two working hands for this maneuver, and the one they're both lying on is numb -- and she moves just enough to knock the back of her hand into the palm of his free one. Stretches out her fingers and weaves them through his, then closes her fingers over his. Softly. Gently. No pressure at all, and he can't quite remember the last time he got either softness or gentleness from Jackson. He's not sure he ever has. So he turns his head to the side. Nuzzles hair out of the way until he can brush his lips against the skin of her neck and lays his head down again. He still drags his other hand out from under the two of them, though, because the arm is numb to the _elbow._ But there's no other need to move.

Not right now.

#

The Priors hit Earth with plague. It sweeps across the planet and three hundred thousand people die before the SGC is able to isolate a vaccine, something they only manage to do because Gerak, leader of the Jaffa Nation (who embraced Origin and became a Prior), realizes that one set of False Gods is as bad as another. Healing the plague-victims in the SGC Infirmary signs his death-warrant, but it gives them a vaccine.

Cam spends the two weeks of the near-Apocalypse babysitting the IOA and doing a bunch of other things he doesn't think he does well. Teal'c is the one who convinces Gerak to see the light; Sam helps Dr. Lam do everything she can to keep the victims alive, and Jackson ... Jackson is holed up in her office with the book they brought back from Avalon, trying to translate it. It's written in Ancient, though, and she hasn't been having much luck.

But the war's come home now, and they're under even more pressure to win.

#

Ever since they brought back the cache of stuff from Avalon that started this mess, Sam's spent a lot of time in a turf-war with Dr. Lee over one of the items they brought back. It looks a little like a computer. It just doesn't seem to _do_ anything.

He'd really been thinking of Sam as 'the normal one,' because, well, Teal'c's an alien and nobody who was in the same room with her for more than fifteen minutes would ever consider Jackson 'normal.' That's until Cam realizes -- _really_ realizes -- that Sam's idea of a good time is pulling all-nighters with alien technology. He's glad he isn't the one who gets the two of them stuck in an alternate dimension, and he's _really_ glad he decided to take a quick vacation off to the Sodan homeworld when Jackson gets stuck there too.

There's good news and better news and bad news after that. The good news is that they all get back to their own dimension just fine. The better news is that the alien computer was built by Merlin the Magician (Ancient, Ascended, whatever) and that he was working on something to kill Ascended -- meaning Ori. The bad news is that getting the three of them back to their own dimension pretty much breaks the thing, and the one Gate address they get out of it is _not_ where Merlin's secret weapon is. Jackson says Merlin called his device the 'Orichalcum', and that in various ancient writings, orichalcum was a mysterious substance associated with Atlantis. Supposed to be the source of its power. Or maybe not. And nothing to do with Merlin. It doesn't really get them anywhere; they still don't have it. They just have a galaxy-full of places to look. 

And he only _thought_ he'd seen obsession before. But by now he knows that obsession translates, the same way kinetic potential translates. One kind of need becomes another, and if every need can't be met, at least some of them have to be. Otherwise you just can't survive.

#

She's on her back, on the bed, regarding him with what he's now come to realize is the not-precisely-attention Jackson gives to ninety-eight percent of the world. And what he's about to do goes against every polite rule of what you do in bed that Cam knows. If you want to try something new, you ask first. You make sure. The only thing he's completely sure of here is that she'll shut him down if he goes outside the bounds. It'll have to do. He's done his research. Trimmed and filed his nails down until his fingertips ache and scrubbed until he could probably do _surgery._ Everything's right, but this doesn't _feel_ right, and all week, ever since he got the idea of it, he's asked himself a thousand times why he's doing it, why he's even thinking of doing it. It's not something she's asked for.

She never asks for anything.

He doesn't know if she'll like it, if she'll want it (he doesn't want to think that she will, that he's almost sure she will; he wouldn't offer it if he didn't think that), if he can do it. He's had his fingers in her before. A couple of fingers in her when he's had his mouth on her; rubbing in and out, listening to her breathing deep and slow, waiting for the burst of words, the descent of silence; other times to touch, finding out what works, heating up, cooling down. Not like this.

She knows what he's planning, he thinks, as soon as he gets the bottle of lube out, because her cheeks flush, and all of a sudden the atmosphere in the bedroom is like the air just before a storm. Charged, and waiting for the first strike of lightning. And if they were going to talk about this, they'd talk now, but neither of them says a word.

He kneels between her thighs and slicks up his hand and touches her. She's braced on her elbows, watching him, but when his fingers skim over her -- probing, parting -- her head drops back, and he can see the long straining line of her throat. And even though she isn't looking at him now, he knows she sees him.

He slides his fingers in -- three fingers -- and back out again; folds his hand carefully and now it's four. His hand is in her to the base of his thumb, and she's shifting position, laying herself out flat, hitching down, just a little, so the backs of her thighs are spread out across the tops of his. At this precise moment he's not sure why he's doing this, why he started, and his body can't decide whether he's more turned on than he's ever been in his life or scared to death, not so much of anything he's doing, but of the fact she wants it so damned much. She does. He knows she does.

He pulls his hand back, and folds his thumb into his palm, and slides his fingers in again. Twist of the wrist. Corkscrew motion. He watches, half in awe, half in disbelief, as his hand slides up inside her, feels heat and slickness and wet and the fluttery clutch of muscles, and then he's all the way there, feeling a tight clamp around his wrist, and his heart is hammering in his chest as if he's been running. He pushes forward a little more, and as he does, he feels his fingers curl. Making a fist. As he pulls back, he feels her sigh. No sound, just a long exhalation of breath.

In.

He doesn't have any words for this. He's not turned on, except he is. Watching. And it's intimate in a way he knows he doesn't have words to describe, because if they haven't been being intimate up until now, what _have_ they been doing? But this is different. And she might be paying less attention to him at this exact moment than she ever has anywhere, but in another way they've never been closer, and it isn't him (now, finally) that's doing all the reaching. He can feel every shudder and spasm her body makes, feel the walls of her cunt clamp down over his hand and wrist as the muscles clutch and ripple over him then release. When he puts his other hand on her belly he can feel his fist moving inside her. She has one arm thrown across her eyes to block the light; her other hand is pressed over her mouth.

"'S all right, baby," he says. "You make all the noise you want." He isn't sure if she hears him. He isn't sure where she is. The sounds she's making are low-pitched, resonant; exquisitely well-mannered screams. He knows from that she hasn't gotten where she's going yet.

He doesn't want this to be what she wants. But he wants what they do here to be what she needs. Realizing that is like solving a riddle. He's had all the pieces for a long time. He was just looking at them the wrong way. 'Want' and 'need' and 'have' and sometimes they don’t sort out neatly. He reaches for the bottle, squirts lube along his wrist and moves out and in with a tight frictionless glide. Faster.

And the sounds she's making change in pitch and for the first time there's tension in her thighs as they grip his. And he doesn't want her coming up off the bed, doesn't want her moving (thinks of tying her down, thinks of what he could do then, and pushes the thought away) so he puts his free hand back on her stomach and pushes, just a little.

And the sounds she's making are garbled, trying to be words (muffled by her hand) but she can't manage it, and he sees the flash of teeth as she forces the side of her hand into her mouth, and he thinks _going to be teeth marks_ but there's nothing he can do about that now and he thinks about rubber balls and leather straps (won't think about that) and the sounds he can hear now (muffled, forced) sound like dogs quarrelling over meat. Her hands are fists, and every muscle's flexed and tensed, and he moves his fist inside her, twisting shifting gliding scraping, and he can feel her trembling, and he can feel the same sense of anticipation/uncertainty that he used to feel when he flew.

When she comes (comes apart) her body clamps down on his hand, on his wrist, and he knew you were supposed to expect it but that's different from actually _feeling_ it, and he tries to relax, tries to go with it, but his heart's hammering and he's gasping as if he can't draw a decent breath of air. And her hands come down, hitting the mattress at her sides with a soft slap, and she's gasping, crying out, loud and angry and desperate and the sound is enough to raise up the hackles on the back of his neck, and at the bottom of his mind Cam thinks: _goddammit, I knew you'd do this, I knew._ She's arching up, pushing herself up, and he doesn't think, doesn't even _have_ to think, takes his free hand off her belly where he'd been gentle with her and slams it down, open palmed, into the center of her chest, hard enough to raise the dead. And there's silence and her arms slide flat against the mattress and she goes back down and everywhere that she's touching him with the outside of her body her muscles go so loose that in the softness and the silence he thinks for an instant that he's killed her, until he hears the soft faint sobbing sounds she makes as she breathes in; the open-throated moan as she exhales -- as if she's trying to be silent and has forgotten how -- and the clamp and push of coming has forced his hand a good bit of the way out of her and he eases it the rest of the way free. He spreads his fingers and flexes them. Nothing's broken.

He can feel her heart hammer against his palm.

He feels drained.

He takes his hand away and sits back and reaches for the lube and caps it off; reaches over to set it back in the still-open drawer. Wipes his hand dry on a towel (plenty of towels here; he's learned to keep a stack of towels beside the bed, on the bottom shelf of the nightstand, and the first time he heard her call them 'trick towels' he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing, because where would she have learned language like that?) All before he looks at her.

Stock-still. Eyes closed. Asleep or passed out or just doesn't want to notice him right now. The place where he slapped her (hit her _struck_ her) is still red, but the mark's starting to fade.

He's not sure even what to think about right now, so he eases out from between her thighs, realizing that his shoulders are thrumming at him and his arm aches as if he's been doing slow curls for the last hour. He flexes his hand again and then grabs a fistful of covers from the foot of the bed, dragging them up. She doesn't even twitch when he lies down beside her and pulls the covers up over both of them. He knows better than to fuss and tuck. They'll just have to lie where they lie. Once he's settled in, her hand moves to the side just a few inches, her fingers brushing against his thigh. Two or three times, so he'll know it's deliberate.

He doesn't think he's going to sleep, but he does.

#

He wakes up, and the bed's empty. The way the light's shifted on the ceiling tells him he's slept about an hour. Maybe less. He feels betrayal and worry and something like anger, but it won't be the first time she's slipped out behind his back. Not good with 'goodbye.' Not that much better with 'hello.' Sometimes he wonders how the hell she got her reputation as a diplomat and communicator. But he knows, he thinks. It's all in the translation.

Then he hears the toilet flush, and she comes walking back out of the bathroom. Naked. Moving maybe a touch carefully, but he's looking at her face, and sure, she's frowning a little because she isn't wearing her glasses, but he doesn't get the sense that he has (most of the time) that she's on her way to somewhere else. Climbs back into the bed and cuddles right up, and he can count the times he's had his arms around Jackson when they weren't fucking or about to fuck on the fingers of one hand. It's not payoff, because that's something he's never going to get from her and doesn't want. Jackson's strange, but she's got her own ideas of honesty. She isn't interested in handing out bribes. If she's cuddled up now, it's because she wants to be, not to get something. Her ways of getting things are a damned sight more direct. He certainly knows that by now.

"You're not going to move, next time," he says, and he hears his own words at the same time he's saying them and he thinks: _Sweet Baby Jesus, there's going to be a next time?_

But she just kisses the hollow of his throat and slides her arm around him, under his, and slips her hand up his back until she gets to the place where the muscles still ache and starts working them gently. Kisses his throat again and rocks her hips gently forward against his. He puts his arms around her and gathers her in and holds her close.

#

“We need to talk to the Ori,” she says, and Cam says: “We've been talking to them.”

With a spectacular lack of success, although they now (thanks to Anubis's leftover genetic experiment) have a semi-functioning prototype of a device that will shut down Prior mind-powers at least temporarily. It's their first success in a while, and the only reason the SGC hasn't been shut down, according to the rumor mill.

Jackson gives him the look she reserves for moments he’s been particularly stupid. “We’re talking to the _Priors.”_

Jackson's pieced together a theory that might be true but that she can't prove: that the Ori are Ascended (since the Priors claim to offer the followers of Origin Ascension), which means they're Ancients. Sort of the Sith, if the other ones, the Gatebuilders like Orlin's people, are the Jedi. Since they can't even get the Ascended on the phone, Cam isn't sure how Jackson intends to talk to the Ori. Or (for that matter) exactly what good it would do.

Then the Ori's followers invade in force. Not just Priors this time, but ships and shock-troops, through a second Supergate they didn't find until a little too late. The Ori ships take out half the Jaffa fleet (former _Goa'uld ha'taks_ ), a couple of Asgard chariots, and the Russian 303 without even trying. If _Odyssey_ hadn't survived, nobody at all would have gotten to go home.

Sam works her voodoo, and they manage to block the Supergate with a permanent outgoing wormhole, but the damage is already done. And they couldn't stop the Priors when it was just them, so what chance do they have against ships that can take out the best the Asgard can send, and thousands of fanatical Ori-indoctrinated troops besides?

The only ray of light is that the fleet doesn't strike immediately for Earth. General Landry wants to know why, of course (because the IOA will be screaming for answers to the same question the moment they get the news). Jackson suggests that after twenty-five thousand years of _Goa'uld_ dominion, Earth is one of the most densely-populated planets in the galaxy. The Ori are obviously saving the best for last.

#

The higher-ups -- the IOA, the Joint Chiefs -- know there's a weapon out there (somewhere) that can save Earth (and the rest of the galaxy, but most of them don't give a rat's ass about that). General Landry does as much as he can to cover for the SGC, but he answers to the President just like most of them do. Right after the Ori fleet invades, SG-1 is hauled off the line to spend a week in DC explaining why the hell they haven't pulled a miracle out of their collective ass yet. And Jackson is mild as milk the whole time, and Cam knows (thinks, guesses, imagines) it's all an act. He prepares accordingly.

#

He buys them at a store downtown, feeling like he's naked in public, though they're innocent enough things to buy. Silk scarves, big ones, thirty-six inches square. The silk is heavy. They aren't even black. He buys a dozen. That weekend he calls her and (more or less) invites himself over. He's got a double bed with a padded headboard. Jackson's got a king-size bed with a wood-slat headboard and footboard. Heavy as hell; it never shakes no matter what they do on it. He doesn't know if it will be quite right, but it will have to do.

She opens the door. She's expecting him, but not the bag: he used to stay the night, sometimes, in the beginning, until he realized that when he did it meant he'd be sleeping alone in her bed. Now, when he comes here, he leaves afterwards. 

She offers him coffee; they talk a little. Codedly, about work. Not much else in the way of a common language, and he used to think (back at the beginning) that it was deliberate on her part, and he's not sure when it was he started to think (to believe) that it isn't really a conscious choice on Jackson's part. When they move into the bedroom, the bag comes too. She raises an eyebrow at that, blandly challenging, but he doesn't say anything. He sets it down beside the bed. His mouth is dry. She comes over to him. They always kiss at this point, but she can tell something's off today. "You can leave, you know," she says.

He shakes his head. "No."

She takes the last half-step forward. There's always a faint flicker of _something_ right about now, as if she's nerving herself up. It was there the first time they kissed, and it's never gone away. She raises her face to his.

She lets him undress her; he folds her clothes and sets them on the chair in the corner. She's already folded the covers neatly back to the foot; a thick roll. She sits in the middle of the sheets, knees drawn up to her chin, watching him strip. When he's finished folding his clothes and setting them on the floor beside the chair, she takes off her glasses and puts them on the bedside table. Everything done according to ritual.

He sits down on the edge of the bed to reach for the bag. The scarves are on top, already carefully folded into long broad soft strips. The bottle of lube is underneath. He takes out the first scarf. "I'm going to tie your hands to the bed," he says. It's an effort to speak, to make this seem commonplace. Ordinary.

Her head whips around toward him. There's a beat of silence -- too long -- before she speaks. As if she's trying to decide what role to play. "I'm not going anywhere," she says.

"Not this time," he answers.

She laughs, mocking him, and lies back, adjusting herself until she's in the center of the bed, spreading her arms wide. Daring him.

He crawls across her to start with the wrist on the far side. He wraps the scarf once around her wrist before tying it around the bedpost -- he's thought about this, about how to do it. He makes sure the knots are firm. He's not sure how he's going to get them undone again, but he's brought a knife. She tugs at the scarf, smiling a 'dare-you' smile, and the white silk looks like bandages against her skin. He climbs back to do the other side. Has to haul at her a little to get her wrist to reach, but that's good. It means she won't be able to move much. He sees her muscles tense and relax as she pulls against the silk, testing it, but the knots hold. He picks up the bag, sets it on the bed, reaches into it for two more scarves. If she wants to be silent, he'll give that to her.

He straddles her hips then, leaning in, and there's a flash of warning in her eyes as he brushes the hair from her forehead. The silk creaks as she strains, and he's suddenly light-headed, realizing that _she really can't get loose._

"'S okay, baby," he whispers. "'S okay. 'M just gonna gag you." And in what universe could a sentence like that _ever_ be okay? But she relaxes, and lifts her head, and opens her mouth, and he slides the doubled weight of folded white silk between her lips, and ties it snugly behind her head. And she clamps her teeth over it and settles back again, closing her eyes.

He's shaking, his hands are trembling, and he knows he has to do something to take the edge off, something so that he can focus on what comes next. He reaches into the bag again for the lube. The knife at the bottom of the bag has as much weight as a gun; his fingers brush over it and shy away.

He works his way back down her body again. Puts his knees between her thighs, spreading them. He's so hard he aches with it, and she's looking at him now, but her face has no expression, distorted by the slash of silk. He uncaps the lube, squirts it into his hands, smoothes it along the crack of her ass. When he slides the first finger into her ass he sees all the muscles in her arms and shoulders suddenly stand out in sharp relief.

There is no sound.

He lifts her knees up over his shoulders and slides himself into her, and it's hot and tight and slick and she's trapped, pinned, unable to move, unable to speak. He sees her chest heave and her throat work and the sounds, oh god, the _sounds..._

He closes his eyes but he can still see her. And she can't move, he's forcing all of her weight up onto her shoulders as he thrusts, and he clutches at her hips, her ass, and he knows he doesn't have to think about her because hers will come next; this is for him, he's doing this for himself because of her, and it's incandescent; it's everything he ever wanted, it's nothing he ever wanted and it's hard and fast and heavy and dirty.

When he comes it's so fast and so hard that he shouts in surprise, pitching forward, sinking down, bending her in half until her knees nearly touch her chest and his head is hanging down and drops of sweat are falling from his face to her skin and his blood is pounding in his ears as forcefully as the blows of a beating. He hangs there, cradled on her thighs, counting his heartbeats, counting his breaths, as they slow, until he can find the strength to work himself free. He lowers her legs gently to the mattress and strokes her thigh. When he looks at her face, her eyes are closed, but she opens them for just a moment when she feels him watching her. Nods -- the barest movement of her head -- and closes her eyes again.

He slides off the bed and goes to clean up.

#

He comes back from the bathroom, hands tingling from the scrubbing he's given them. He's got a wet washcloth, and he wipes her carefully. Sex can kill you, but there are fates worse than death. He's calm now. Centered. Ready.

She's watching him again.

He covers his hand with lube until it's dripping, glistening, shining (thinks of monster movies, things best left in the dark); she's swollen and ready, and she jerks a bit when he touches her, but he knows (this time) to get right up close, and the only thing he has to worry about is her getting her feet flat on the bed and pushing off.

"You move," he says warningly, "I'm gonna stop."

Her eyes widen, as if him speaking to her now is the most shocking thing that's ever happened in this bed, but she nods, once, jerkily.

He knows (this time) how fast he can go, and how hard, and to keep the lube close by, and when he needs to add more. His hand goes in easier this time.

He watches her face, watches the silk in her mouth darken with the spreading wetness of saliva. (There was a bruise on her hand, the other time, where she bit herself.) Listens for the sounds. Muffled, garbled. Clear enough. Works her, and his mind is calm, his senses clear, but it still feels like flying, and he wonders (can't know) what this feels like to her. Her chest heaves, and she pulls on the silk around her wrists, and finally she starts to shake her head, but he doesn't stop, because he knows it isn't time to stop. There won't be any need to guess. Her body will tell him. There's peace in that, and a kind of strange comfort. Here, in this bed, he doesn't have to guess.

And finally she's there (he's there) and it takes her, shakes her, shakes her apart (but it's safe here, he's made her safe) and the muffled throat-sounds behind the silk rise and fall and die away, and he feels as if he's the one who's made the journey out of the dark place (but isn't it her?) And he works his hand free (carefully, gently; he can afford to be gentle now) and cleans himself up.

When he goes to work the gag off her he sees that the silk is frayed. Gnawed.

He has to use a knife on the other scarves. The knots are drawn too tight to untie. When he's cut her loose and unwound the silk from her wrists he arranges her arms at her sides carefully. She's limp, unresisting, unresponsive. That's all right. He strokes her cheek. Her lips part slightly. He leans down and brushes them with his own, then turns to the foot of the bed to unroll the sheets and blankets over both of them. It's time to rest.

#

Jackson used to go out to bars. He doesn't ask Jackson (God knows) and he doesn't ask Sam. But he's got clearance to read Jackson's security reviews, and he does, because the people Jackson refers to as their 'dear and gentle masters,' are screaming their fool heads off for results that God Himself couldn't provide, and General O'Neill in Washington and General Landry at the SGC won't be able to protect them much longer and meanwhile the pressure's mounting and they all feel it. He doesn't worry about himself so much, but if they're going to find the Orichalcum, either Jackson's got to track it down or Sam's got to build one, and he doesn't worry about Sam so much either, because she's the dark horse. The pressure's squarely on Jackson, and he thinks she's _this close_ to shattering. And he knows what she does to blow off steam now, but he wants to know what she did before he came along, because there might be something in that he can use to help her now.

The answers he gets aren't what he expects.

In the middle of her first year at the SGC she started picking up men in bars. Six years later she stopped. Jackson's sex life seems to have been bookended by two _Goa'uld,_ Hathor and Anubis, and knowing that doesn't do Cam a lot of good. All he knows is that every time they're in bed now -- and it's more often than it was, as often as they can manage -- Jackson keeps pushing for _more._

That isn't all.

After the weekend he tied her to the bed, the next time he'd walked into her bedroom, there was a set of cuffs lying on the pillow. Not handcuffs, these were black leather, designed to be buckled around the wrist, with snap-hooks and leather straps that could be looped around the bedposts. He couldn't imagine where the hell she got them.

_"What the hell are you thinking?"_ he'd demanded. _"Do you want me to tie you up and beat you?"_

That had earned him one of her best snake looks. _"Pain doesn't interest me,"_ she'd said dismissively, and Cam knew she was lying. Or wrong. Pain interests Jackson. A lot.

He'd used the cuffs, though. Quicker and easier and more efficient than tying her up (down) with scarves, and he didn't like the look he'd seen in her eyes when he had the knife in his hand. When he got home afterward, he found them in his bag. He brought them with them the next time he came.

When the ball-gag appears, he accepts it without comment.

#

When the Ori sent a fleet -- and an army -- through the Supergate, they sent a General with it. She's called the Orici, and nobody knows a damned thing more about her than that -- even most of the new converts (and there are more of them every week). All anybody the teams talk to can say is that she 'speaks with the voice of the Ori.' Jackson looks interested; Cam really should have known (in retrospect) what a bad sign that was. All SG Teams have orders to apprehend the Orici if possible, and they have a good laugh over that, considering that they haven't been able to keep their hands on one of the fucking _Priors_ for more than a couple of hours.

But the SGC is 'strongly encouraged' to gather intel, which means (even though their standing orders are to run like hell at the first sign of a Prior) taking risks. And okay, maybe Cam doesn't have four PhDs, but he is pretty damned sure that taking risks does not mean _getting your ass captured by a Prior._

Jackson's the one who talks them into sticking around to hear the fella preach. Newly-conquered Ori world, one that SG-1 had visited about five years back, and that particular mission didn't go all that well according to the reports he's seen, but Cam doubts there's anybody left who remembers them, and _he's_ never been there at all. It will be particularly valuable to listen to this particular Prior's spiel (Jackson says) because until it went Ori, P25-4C3 had been a heavily-industrialized world with a technology level and population similar to mid 20th century Earth. What _completely slips Jackson's mind_ (never made it into the official reports but Cam ought to know enough -- by now -- to ask the other three what isn't there) is that she's considered a war criminal on Kelowna. Apparently the Ori takeover and the complete destruction of their entire civilization haven't been enough to make the Kelownans forget about little things like that.

They're lucky at first. Nobody recognizes her. Then the Prior shows up to preach and the crowd gathers round him. They move into the middle of it and settle in to listen. And that's when the luck Cam didn't realize he needed runs out.

The moment the first whispered disturbances start going through the crowd, Jackson starts edging away from the rest of them. As a result, by the time she's grabbed, there's a dozen people between her and Cam. They couldn't bring their P90s this trip, but they've all got zats. Enough to clear their way back to the Stargate if they're lucky; it's out in the open and they've got a pretty clear shot at it. Sam says it used to be underground -- but then, she also says there used to be a city here.

When he reaches for his zat, it's Teal'c who stops him. The Kelownans are already dragging Jackson up to the platform where the Prior's standing. Her glasses have been knocked askew, but she looks pretty calm. She knows they'll be back for her, and to do that, they need to get out of here first. They start working their way toward the back of the crowd as the Prior goes into his 'behold the downfall of the enemies of Origin' speech. It's enough of a crowd-pleaser that they're actually able to make it to the Stargate and dial home.

General Landry sends Colonel Reynolds' team to Kelowna less than thirty minutes after what's left of SG-1's boots hit the Gate Room ramp. SG-3's done a lot of undercover work on Ori worlds in the last several months. They're able to send back regular reports. SG-3 knows where Jackson's being held, but they can't get close enough to get her out. A few days later there's more news, and it isn't good. Every nine days the followers of Origin celebrate by spending the entire day in Prostration. The local Prior announces that Jackson's going to be purified to kick off the festivities. When General Landry hears that, he recalls SG-3. And then Cam spends three hours in his office convincing him to let SG-1 mount a last-ditch rescue attempt, because 'purification' in Ori-speak means they burn you to death. They've seen it happen on other worlds.

General Landry doesn't want to say 'yes,' but they both know that if he doesn't, Cam's next stop is a call to Washington, his career be damned. And Homeworld may not quite run the SGC, but General O'Neill can still call in enough favors that he can get things done if he wants to. And Cam thinks O'Neill would want them to try to rescue Jackson.

The three of them are back on Kelowna seven days after they left. It's Sunday morning back on Earth. Jackson's led out into the square (from one of the only buildings still standing) by a couple of Priors. She looks, Cam thinks, more irritated than anything else: it's early, and he knows she hates to get up early if she doesn't have to. The Priors chain her to the stone chair at one end of those big stone dishes the followers of the Ori use to burn people to death. It's one of the first things they build when a world goes Ori. 

Jackson doesn't struggle against the chains.

A woman comes walking out of one of the buildings. She's got two more Priors with her. None of them has ever seen her, but it isn't hard to guess who she is. The Ori Pope. The Orici. She raises her hand, and the bucket of oil tips over and starts pouring down into the channels cut into the stone all by itself. Sets on fire all by itself, too. It will take about two minutes to reach Jackson.

And they've all got guns this time, hidden under their jackets, and Sam's even got the prototype Anti-Prior Device with her -- smuggled it out of her lab -- but there are four Priors and the Orici here, and guns won't work against a Prior unless you've neutralized him first, and the device will only work on one at a time and none of them has any idea of what the Orici can do, and they're surrounded by about five thousand people which would be one thing if they'd just put a bullet through the head of the only Prior in sight and a whole different story if they can't.

Cam looks up at Teal'c and the man looks like what he's wishing right now is that they'd brought bigger and better guns and maybe a Gatebuster, but all Teal'c does is shake his head, just a little. They can't shoot their way out of this, not this time. Can't get to her and get her loose -- can't even _kill her_ before the fire reaches her. All they can do is watch. 

Cam can see her face. It's calm. She's not going to give the Priors anything. He doesn't know if she sees them. Maybe it would be a comfort to her to know she didn't die alone, but they're all pretty sure the Priors are telepathic, and Jackson sacrificed herself to save them, so she'd be really pissed if they all got captured now because she'd seen them and the Priors got the information out of her head. Cam doesn't want to watch, but he won't look away. If he can't let her know they've come back for her, he won't let her death go unseen by someone who cares about her. He grits his teeth and watches it all, and he's a little surprised, and grateful, and very proud that she doesn't make a sound. Not one. At the very end the flames are too high for him to see her, and so he doesn't know what happens -- just that it isn't what the Orici was expecting, because all of a sudden she waves her hand and the fire disappears. It's gone, and there isn't even the scent of burning left.

There's no body, either. Just chains and an empty chair.

It might be what saves the three of them, since Cam knows (all three of them knew) the Priors would probably be expecting a rescue attempt. But the Orici has to pretend that everything came out the way she meant it to -- _Hallowed Be the Ori_ \- even though everyone can see that it didn't, so there's a short speech about witnessing the power of the Ori followed by _six fucking hours_ of Prostration, and Pope Joan (Jackson tagged her with the nickname one night; if she's actually got a name they don't know it) sure as hell doesn't stick around for all of it. And when they can finally get up off their goddamned knees it isn't too hard to slip away and get back to the Gate.

Sam's crying (been crying for a while, silently) and Cam feels like he's been punched in the stomach. Teal'c just looks pissed. Forget what the hell they're going to tell General Landry. _What the hell is he going to tell General O'Neill?_

And it turns out he isn't going to really get a lot of time to think about that, because when the three of them come down the ramp, General O'Neill is right there in the Gate Room with General Landry, and the man can count to three as well as anybody else can. He looks down at the floor for just a minute and then back up at them, and there's no expression on his face at all. "You did your best," he says, and Cam knows it's Sam and Teal'c he's talking to. The two surviving members of the _original_ SG-1.

General Landry sends them off for their post-mission physical -- more necessary than ever when they've been to an active Ori world (especially since Earth was hit with the Prior Plague), and (these days) always followed by a mandatory 48 hours of on-Base observation -- but after the physical there's no way out of it. And he wants to howl at the moon, wants to kick something, wants to _break_ something, because not only is he going to go down in history as the guy who got a member of SG-1 killed (and he shouldn't care about that right now but he does), _Jackson's_ dead, and he thinks about holding her, and kissing her, and lying beside her, and how that's all over because she got herself (he got her) burned alive.

They go back and make their reports. Everything they saw, and -- as important -- what they didn't see. O'Neill listens to all of it looking as if he wishes he were somewhere else. God knows Cam wishes _he_ were. This is _not_ the way he wanted to run into Batshit Jack again. _Not_ running into him again _ever_ was pretty high up there on his do-list, actually, and it suddenly occurs to Cam that he's had sex with three out of four of the members of the original SG-1 (something he hopes to hell O'Neill doesn't remember; coming up on twenty years ago now, when they were both in Iraq) and he doesn't intend to make it a clean sweep. He schools his face to blankness, because Jackson's dead and if he starts laughing now someone's sure to take it the wrong way.

"I'm not having her declared dead without a body," O'Neill says when they're done.

"Jack--" General Landry says.

"She's pulled this before. No body, no funeral."

For a moment Cam wonders if O'Neill's gone right round the bend.

"Sir," Sam says, and from her tone of voice she's wondering that too. "That was Nem. He hypnotized us. You remember."

O'Neill looks across the table at Sam, and his mouth quirks in an expression that -- if you really stretched a point -- could be called a smile. "Carter, have we seen _any_ evidence that these Ori are less powerful than that fish-guy?"

Sam glances at him and Cam knows what she's asking for. "Well, uh, sir, the, uh, Orici didn't really seem to be expecting the ... what happened."

"Then that means she didn't expect it, Mitchell. No body, no funeral."

Cam looks over at Teal'c, but the big guy is actually looking as if he thinks O'Neill might have a point. "Danielle Jackson may yet be a prisoner somewhere, O'Neill."

Cam just wants to just put his head down on the Conference Room Table and _howl._ Jackson's dead and Teal'c's gone crazy. And O'Neill really doesn't look happy to be reminded of the possibility that if Jackson _isn't_ dead, she's got to be _somewhere._

"We'll do as much searching for her as we can, Jack," General Landry says. "Meanwhile, we'll just list her as MIA."

O'Neill nods as if that's just _fine._ "Less paperwork that way."

#

Two days later (when they're set free) Sam shows up at his apartment with a bottle of vodka and a six-pack of beer. Cam isn't sure whether or not this is a wake. He wants to think that Jackson's alive. But he saw her burned to death right in front of him. Didn't he?

"I'm sorry," Sam says a couple of hours later. Her head is lolling against the back of the couch, and she's definitely going to be sleeping here, because they're both too drunk to drive. Cam knows _he_ is, because he doesn't feel drunk at all. He just feels as if he could solve the secrets of the universe.

"Wasn't anything any of us could have done, Sam," he says, and wonders why -- even now, in his mind -- it's 'Jackson' and 'Sam', considering that he's sleeping (was sleeping) with one and not with the other. Although that may change by morning.

"Not that," Sam says. "I'm sorry I called you last July."

"I... what?"

"I should have done it. I did it before. But you know that." She rolls her head to the side to look at him, and she might be drunker than he is right now, but her expression is unpleasantly sober.

He's not sure what she thinks he knows. He's not sure he wants to. "Sam," he says.

"She wants to love people. I don't know if she remembers how. She- I- We- It was when General O'Neill was frozen. She was so unhappy. She called me. I came and got her..." Sam's voice trails off, and Cam knows that whatever she's seeing, it isn't his living room. It sort of sums up his life right there: the fact that he can have conversations involving the phrase 'when General O'Neill was frozen' and they can be _normal._

"I don't know why..." Sam says. She takes a deep breath. "No. I do. We were close. He was gone. This is a ... lonelier life than most. But there are things you shouldn't know even about the people you love most, Cam. Things you should never find out."

Topping the list just might be that he isn't the only member of SG-1 that Jackson's slept with. _Fucked._ And that Sam apparently feels that sending him out to pick Jackson up that night was the equivalent of throwing him to the wolves. He's not sure whether he wants to concede her point or not. "She's dead," he says. He's not sure who he's trying to convince.

And Sam laughs, brittle and hysterical. "We can hope," she says, and then she looks horrified, and stares at him. "I didn't mean..." she says, and stops. "I just think, you know, Cam ... she'd be happier."

And he thinks, at that point, that they've both had quite enough to drink. So he gets to his feet, and gets her up off the couch, and gets them both off to his bed. And somewhere early in the morning, when they're both in that in-between place between still-drunk and hung-over, she turns toward him in the bed, and puts her hand on him, and they make love. It's careful and gentle and tender and slow.

And it's all wrong.

#

It's not the last time he sleeps with Sam. He's not sure what either of them is searching for, other than some way for Jackson not to be dead, and they aren't going to find it through sex. The sex is less than spectacular, though they both try their best (obligation, distraction). It's soothing, at least, to have another body in the bed. Jackson's gone and it leaves both of them feeling lonelier than Cam would have imagined, because Jackson wasn't exactly the world's most touchy-feely person, and he's been fucking her -- if not sleeping with her -- but he can't quite think of her as either a 'friend' or a 'lover.' And Sam feels the same absence, the same loss, and so she tells Cam things, some of which he's not sure he wants to hear.

That she slept with Jackson more times than she could count (chastely, in the line of duty), and had sex with her four times, almost five, over a two-week period (each time at Jackson's instigation, because Sam doesn't now, and never has, defined herself as 'bisexual'), and in the middle of 'almost five' she broke down in tears and said she couldn't do this any more and Jackson got her bathrobe and got her tea and got her vodka and got her drunk and was a perfect gentleman about things (Sam's words, on the edge of tears, even three years later) and a month or so later they got Colonel O'Neill back and at that point Sam stops talking. And Cam wonders and suspects but mostly he can't imagine. And one of the things Sam won't talk about is why she and Jackson really started having sex and what happened to make them stop, though he knows Sam's no prude and he can't imagine Jackson ever forcing anyone.

That she knows Cam was fucking Jackson -- _'you're fucking her, aren't you, god damn you, god damn her,'_ \-- and Cam isn't quite sure why she's angry about it, especially since the two of _them_ are sleeping together now. But she seems to feel that it's something Jackson did to him (as if it were an injury), and that by letting it happen, Cam has committed (has allowed to happen) something somewhere between a failure and a betrayal. That hurts most of all, because all he wants (all he's ever wanted since he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs) is what's best for all of them. SG-1. The SGC. Earth. Jackson. Sam. Teal'c. 

But now Jackson's dead, and the way Sam can't seem to remember that _Jackson's dead_ is the most disturbing thing of all, Cam thinks, because none of them seem to be able to remember that. Not Sam, not Teal'c, not O'Neill. None of the people who know -- who _knew,_ who _knew_ \-- her better than he ever would can remember (will admit) that, and two of them were at her execution.

He thinks he ought to see about closing up Jackson's apartment. He'd have done it already, but he doesn't have keys to her place. He mentions it to General Landry the first time he thinks of it (four days after her death) and Landry tells him that it's already been taken care of. Cam isn't sure whether that's a relief or not.

Ten days after Jackson's declared MIA, Landry calls Cam back into his office and tells him it's time for him to pick out a new cultural specialist, because it doesn't look as if his old one will be coming back (no memorial service, not with her only being MIA). And they all knew that the day they walked through the Gate, but they've been on stand-down since then, all of them rotated through Base Psychiatric, lying their way through coping with the loss of a team-mate. (Maybe Teal'c isn't lying, Cam doesn't know). Cam spends the afternoon in his office with a stack of files -- all the qualified people currently available -- and then picks one at random. At the orientation briefing the next morning, he discovers Jackson's replacement is Captain (Dr.) Elio Vasquez. Captain Vasquez has been at the SGC for four months. He's the sole survivor of SG-17. Dr. Vasquez is both honored and terrified to have been picked for SG-1.

Over the next month, Cam gets a crash-course in the kid-glove handling he got when SG-1 closed ranks around him. At the time he'd been pretty-much terrified of Teal'c and sure Jackson was ignoring him and Sam seemed to go her own merry way when she wasn't the one giving the orders, and he'd kind of ignored all of it at the time, because he knew damned well that none of them wanted to be there. And they let him know he was _new,_ but they never really made him feel he was _unwanted_ (even Jackson didn't actually give him the feeling he'd be let to run too far, assuming he felt like running.) But now Teal'c is distant and Sam is brusque and Cam knows they're still grieving, but that doesn't make any of this easier. And he tries to reach out to Vasquez all by himself, to make the four of them _mesh,_ but he's grieving too, and Vasquez is skittish and none of it's working. And he goes home at night on the nights he goes home alone and sits in his apartment and doesn't even turn on the lights and thinks about the fact that the Ori are winning and everything's falling apart.

And six more weeks pass.

#

General Landry calls Cam into his office bright and early, yanking him out of the gear-up room to do it. P4X-187 should just be sitting down to breakfast right now and deciding whether or not to go Ori, and Vasquez thinks he has a shot at talking them out of it. Cam really doubts it, since if you don't bow down, the Priors and the Faithful either slaughter you, afflict you with plague, or blow your planet to hell from orbit. But maybe SG-1 can talk the locals into running for their lives before the Priors come back. Not that that really works too well either. It would be nice if they found something that _did_ work. So far they have a device that temporarily neutralizes the power of individual Priors on a case-by-case basis. That's about it.

"Sir," Cam says.

"Dr. Jackson has been found alive in Washington," General Landry says, and Cam stares at him, waiting for the punchline, waiting for what Landry has said to make _sense,_ and finally he realizes it isn't going to.

Landry grimaces, and Cam's relieved to know he knows exactly how _stupid_ what he's just said sounds. "General O'Neill just called to let me know," he says, and Cam thinks: _do you know that the man is crazy, sir?_ And apparently Landry has recently become telepathic (not impossible around here), because he sighs, and says: "Fingerprints, retinal scans, and DNA all match. After that thing with the Asgard a few years back, nobody can really rule out cloning, but..." Landry sighs. "General O'Neill is convinced."

"Can I...?" Cam stops, swallows, tries again. "When can I see her, sir?"

"Your flight leaves Peterson 0900 tomorrow morning, Colonel," General Landry says. "Go tell your team the good news. And -- in light of this -- I'll be sending SG-2 to 187. Tell Captain Vasquez I'd like him to tag along."

"Sir," Cam says. "Yes, sir." He leaves the General's office. Good news for them. Maybe even good news for Vasquez. He's pretty sure the guy was within a few weeks of asking for reassignment.

#

When he gets back down to the gear-up room the other three are looking puzzled. At the summons. At the delay. He doesn't know what to say or how to say it. He sits down on the bench. "Ah... We aren't going to be going to 187. I mean, Vasquez, you are, but you'll be going with SG-2. Our mission's scrubbed," he says. _Start with the easy things._ He bends forward, closing his eyes. He ought to be happy, but right now he just feels tired.

"Is something wrong, sir?" Vasquez asks.

"Jackson's alive," Cam says, staring at the floor.

There's silence, and Cam distracts himself counting his heartbeats, wondering how many there will be before someone says anything.

"Where is she?" Sam finally says.

"Washington," he answers. "DC."

Sam giggles, sounding bright and on the edge of hysterical (Cam isn't sure what's _funny_ in all this), then she cuts herself off sharply and takes a deep breath. "Okay," she says, and Teal'c says, "Indeed," and Vasquez says (sounding hopeful, Cam can't help but think it) "Is she coming back?" And Cam says: "I'm flying out to pick her up tomorrow," hoping (as he says it) that that's actually what he's doing. After a few minutes Vasquez walks off to find SG-2's gear-up room, and Teal'c and Sam start taking off their vests.

Sam goes home with him that night (one last time, Cam thinks, no matter what happens in Washington, because he always thought they'd be good together, good for each other: it was the way they were heading down all the years of not-quite-random intersections, and when they got there it was too late, too early, not-quite-right) and all they do is hold each other, curled together in his sterile bed, until finally they both fall asleep.

#

The whole way to DC he thinks about what to say. Starting with _'what the hell happened?'_ to _'how the hell did you manage to come back from the dead?'_ He usually doesn't want answers where Jackson's concerned (especially to the questions he asks her inside his head), but this time he does. Because every other time she's come back from the dead, there was either a sarcophagus or one of their wacky alien allies involved, and the Ori don't have sarcophaguses (that they know of) and they sure as hell aren't their allies.

He's got travel orders, a billet (nobody's quite sure how long he'll be here), and all the paperwork he needs to fetch Jackson home. When he looked it over (in flight) he discovered she's at Walter Reed (his old not-quite-stomping grounds), and he couldn't quite repress a flinch at the pit of his stomach (transferred there from the Academy Hospital when he was well enough to keep his mouth shut.) There's a car and driver to meet him when his plane lands at Bolling. He gets in and tells the sergeant where to take him. He can check in to his billet later if he needs to.

Eventually the car pulls up in front of an all-too-familiar building, and the driver gives Cam a card with the number of his cellphone (sir) so Cam can call him to pick him up, or tell him to go home, or send him for pizza, and Cam gets out of the car and walks inside, passing the familiar collection of demonstrators (anti-war, pro-troops; hard to tell whether they're on opposite sides or not.) At the front desk he asks for Dr. Jackson's room, and has to show ID before they'll tell him. She's in the VIP wing. Private room.

What do you say to a woman who's come back from the dead? A woman you saw _die_ right in front of your eyes?

The hall in the VIP Wing is quiet and carpeted. He remembers it; they put him here not so much because he was a VIP, but for security. The only survivor of Earth's 302 squadron, and while he was out of his head (during the bad nights, when the therapy pushed him to his limits and they masked the pain with drugs) he might say anything. Alien invaders. Near-miss destruction of Earth. He doesn't think he did, but the nurses on this wing know how to keep their mouths shut. When he gets to Jackson's door, he hears talking, and recognizes a familiar voice. General O'Neill is there. He stops outside, out of their line of sight. He needs a minute. They don't know he's here, and he can hear them clearly.

"--liked you better when you didn't remember who I was."

Cam hears her snort with amusement. _"I_ liked me better when I didn't remember who I was."

"All back now?"

"How would I know? Not the way I usually do it."

There's a beat of silence, then: "Dani? Don't you think that was a little much?"

"What? Dying? Oh, not like it's the first time. You remember when--"

"Aah! Enough grey hairs here."

"And all because of me. Yes. But still--"

And Cam listens to the two of them tease each other, throw out references to things he only knows from reading the cleaned-up versions in the mission reports (he knows perfectly well that even the versions he finally got to read were cleaned up), and he realizes that he has _never_ heard Jackson sound this way. Playful and happy. He hadn't thought she could. He should probably leave, go find the cafeteria, or a vending machine, and get himself some bad coffee, waste half an hour or so and then come back (maybe General O'Neill will be gone by then; anything's possible). Standing here eavesdropping like this just isn't right. Then he hears his name.

"--Mitchell?" Jackson's saying. "Was he a present?"

He's missed the first part of what she said, and whatever it was in answer to.

"He asked for the posting," Cam hears O'Neill say, sounding amused, and he hears Jackson laugh mockingly. And enough's enough. He steps to the doorway and knocks on the door.

Both of them look up at the sound, and for an instant their expressions are identical. O'Neill's in his Blues, but the jacket is unbuttoned, the tie is loose. He looks as if he's been here for a while. Jackson's in the bed, in a set of dark-blue pajamas, so new the creases haven't eased out of them yet. Looking rumpled, but not a day older than the last time Cam saw her, and the first thing he thinks, seeing her, is: _where did she get a pair of her glasses?_ Because they're right there on her face, plain as day, and he kicks himself for not thinking to bring a pair (even though they would have turned out not to be needed) because it would have been the easiest thing in the world to go down to her office before he left and get them. Then Jackson looks away and O'Neill smiles -- not because he's happy to see him, Cam thinks, but just because he's _happy._ "Colonel Mitchell. Hank said you'd be by."

As if he's here for a quart of milk. "Yes, sir," he says. "General Landry sent me to escort Dr. Jackson back to Cheyenne Mountain."

_"Naked?"_ she asks, and O'Neill pats her on the knee. Cam has no real trouble interpreting the gesture. It means _'shut up and stop giving the poor guy a hard time,'_ and he doesn't like the way it makes him feel. He's the one she's been going through the Gate with for over a year now. The one she's been getting _naked_ with. And he's standing here feeling like he's some kind of goddamned errand boy. Feeling ... jealous.

"Not like I could exactly pack you an overnight bag," he says, and then kicks himself (mentally) for talking smack at her in front of a two-star _General,_ for God's sake. Not that O'Neill's exactly going to stand on ceremony, Cam knows. Or care one hell of a lot about the rules.

She glances at him, then back to O'Neill. "Tell me you didn't throw out all my stuff."

O'Neill shakes his head. "Just cleaned out your fridge, stopped your mail, buttoned everything up tight. You aren't even dead." _Officially,_ Cam knows he means, and he wonders just how long O'Neill would have fought changing 'MIA' to 'KIA.' Forever? And then he realizes that O'Neill was the one to close up her place. General Landry said it'd been done, and Cam hadn't thought any more about it at the time. Still reeling from the fact she was dead. If he'd thought about it at all -- if someone had asked him, and he'd had to say -- he'd have said that Landry sent some airmen. They have people at the Mountain who spend most of their time sanitizing the homes of personnel that have been killed in the line of duty. 

"Good," Jackson says darkly. "Because the last two times I was dead it took me for-fucking-ever to get things straightened out with the IRS."

"I'll send someone over with clothes for you," O'Neill says, getting to his feet. "Couple of hours." He's straightening his tie, running a hand through his hair, buttoning his jacket. Setting himself to rights. The last thing he does is pick up his cover, tucking it under one arm. "When does your flight leave, Mitchell?"

"I... Is Dr. Jackson ready to travel, sir?" Cam doesn't think General Landry was intentionally keeping him in the dark. He just thinks O'Neill didn't _tell_ him anything.

O'Neill smiles faintly. "She's ready to leave. I'll tell them. Oh, and Mitchell? Give my best to Carter and T."

"Yes, sir," Cam says.

"Coming to the debriefing?" Jackson asks, when O'Neill's halfway to the door. He stops, glancing back at her.

"Think I'll wait for the movie."

When he's gone, the room seems both smaller and emptier. Cam walks over and takes the vacated seat by the bed. "Hey," he says, sitting down. "You died."

"I do that," she answers, and Cam can actually _feel_ her shutting down, withdrawing. As if there's something about O'Neill (only him) that brings her to life, and Cam wishes, frustrated, that he knew what it was so he could give it to her too.

"You, uh, want to tell me about it?" he asks.

"Here? Not really. Are Sam and Teal'c okay?"

"Fine. They're, uh, fine." And he's got enough experience with women to know that as little as Jackson is anything like a normal woman, the fact that he's been sleeping with -- _fucking_ \-- Sam is going to be a secret for exactly five minutes after the first time the two of them are alone together, and he wonders how Jackson is going to react to that, and he realizes that he has _absolutely no fucking clue._ He wants to tell Jackson he missed her. And he really thinks that would be a bad idea. "We didn't think you were coming back," he says instead.

She smiles faintly. "You and Sam didn't," she corrects. There's a long pause. "So. Who'd you get to replace me?"

He's so busy not saying things that it's a moment before he can reply. "Vasquez," he says.

"SG-17," she says, nodding. "For the whole time?"

"Yeah."

She nods again. "I'll have to send him a fruit basket."

He's not quite sure whether she's making a joke or not. It's too close to right on the nail-head. He feels as if he should apologize to Vasquez, if he could figure out what to say. He supposes the next best thing is a glowing letter of recommendation. _Managed not to commit suicide or make any of us kill him while serving with SG-1._ Yeah, he'd better think of something better than that, even though it's pretty close to the real truth.

"Look," he says -- after another stretch of silence -- because he can't not ask. "Where _were_ you?"

Her expression grows distant, as if she's trying to remember something. "Somewhere else," she finally says.

She's never been one for small-talk. After a few more minutes she sends him off in search of coffee, and while he's out he gets on his cell and lines up their ride back -- a plane is leaving Bolling at six, and it's just after two now; they should make it in plenty of time if her clothes show up. While he's wandering around he stops at the desk and makes sure all the paperwork is in order. Everything is. The moment she's dressed, they can leave. The last thing he does is sweet-talk a nurse out of a couple of cups of coffee and some doughnuts, and even manages to promote a tray. He carries everything back to her room. She drinks the coffee in appreciative silence -- sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed -- and just when he thinks she might send him out for a refill, an airwoman with a shopping bag appears at the door. The two of them do the courtesy-dance -- _Colonel Mitchell: at ease, Sergeant_ \-- and it's another reminder of the fact that (imperceptibly, by degrees) Earth has become the most alien world of all.

"Compliments of General O'Neill, Dr. Jackson," the airwoman says, walking over and setting the bag on the bed.

"Thanks, Irene," Jackson says. "Give Jack a kiss for me."

Sergeant Matthews (he can read her nameplate) smirks, just a little, and wishes Jackson a safe flight. She and Cam do another little dance -- _Colonel Mitchell, a pleasure to meet you_ \-- and she's gone. "You know her?" he asks.

"Jack's keeper," Jackson says dismissively. She's pulling things out of the bag. A pair of canvas slip-on shoes. One of those velour jogging suits that women wear everywhere. It's red, and she makes a face. White t-shirt, bra, panties, but the items at the bottom of the bag are a surprise: a pint bottle of Scotch and half-a-dozen candy bars.

"Um, we can ... stop at a bar," he says. She's unbuttoning her pajama top, and he's not sure whether to look away or not.

"No ID." She tosses the top to the bed and skins out of the bottoms.

"I, ah, actually brought that." Her Cheyenne Mountain ID, because without it, there's a good chance they wouldn't let her back into the Mountain. It was in the folder of documents and travel orders, sealed in a plastic bag, as if it were something brought back from an alien planet.

"Nice. But it won't help much, because, you know, I don't think there's in-flight drink service on the plane." Panties, bra, t-shirt; she dresses with quick efficiency, as if she's alone. "I really don't like flying, Mitchell." She zips up the top.

She's faced down _Goa'uld_ and Ori Priors and God knows what and she needs a drink to get on an _airplane?_ He'll never figure Jackson out. Not if he lives to be a hundred.

"When do we leave?" she asks.

"Eighteen-hundred," he says. He checks his watch. Almost 1500.

She sits down on the bed to slip on the shoes. In the jogging suit -- a brighter color than anything he's ever seen her in -- she looks different, somehow. He's not sure how much of that is her recent resurrection (blasphemous, to think of it in those terms, but _he saw her die_ ) and how much is because, dressed like that, she could be any woman from anywhere. Someone he'd smile at -- in the mall, in the Laundromat -- and maybe she'd smile back, and maybe they'd go for coffee.

She glances at the clock on the wall. "We'd better be on the road by four if we want to be sure to make it. Traffic in this town sucks. Got a favorite bar?"

His favorite bar is three states away and he's not sure if he's ever going to see it again. "No. You?"

"Call your car, Mitchell."

She directs the driver to a place a few minutes away -- dark, leather, pretty clearly a heavy-hitter watering spot. He nurses a beer while she knocks back two double Scotches. The bartender asked her for ID. She doesn't say anything; he's not sure whether she's studying her reflection in the glass behind the bar, or avoiding looking at it. She doesn't say a word, but he has the sense, the way he often does, that there's a whole conversation going on inside her head. Back at the beginning, he always wished he could hear it. The longer he's with SG-1, the less sure he is about that. She's most of the way through the second double when she finally decides to let him join in.

"I planned it," she says.

There are only two things she could be talking about, and the other one's _coming back,_ and he doesn't think, somehow, that's what she means. He locks eyes with her in the mirror, not wanting to believe it, because it's not as if she _sold them out_ (Jackson wouldn't do that, not in a million years, he's certain of that if he's certain of nothing else), but she did something (got herself killed) without warning them, went off on her own (no one warned him she would, everyone warned him she would) and he's not sure why.

She tosses back the last of her drink. "Time to go, Mitchell. Pay the winners."

#

It's 1815 when they go wheels-up at Bolling. With crossing time-zones, it's only an hour later when they land, although they spend about three hours in the air. Time enough for Jackson to put a serious dent in that bottle of Scotch and polish off the candy bars. The combination makes Cam shudder. He hopes to God nobody wants to talk to her tonight, because while she certainly isn't as drunk as he's ever seen her, she sure as hell isn't sober. "Look," he says, when they reach his car, "why don't you come back to my place tonight? You can call Sam, let her know you're here. We can go up to the Mountain tomorrow and get you checked in."

"I'm going home," she says flatly. 

Cam sighs. "You see, the thing is, I'm pretty sure the only keys to your place in this entire state are up at the Mountain. And if we drive up there and get them we have to, uh, drive up there," he finishes helplessly. Jackson has to know she's drunk. He can't imagine she's thinking of walking into the SGC like this.

"Yes," she says patiently. "We drive up there, because that's where the keys are. Call Teal'c."

"What?"

She leans across the hood of the car, looking at him. Neither of them has gotten in. She's regarding him with a heavy-lidded expression that has more to do with irritation than intoxication (Cam knows from experience), and when she speaks, each word is crisply enunciated. "Call Teal'c. Teal'c will get my keys. Teal'c will bring them to the front entrance. Teal'c will give them to me. You will drive me home. If you're good, Mitchell, I'll even let you tuck me in."

He thinks _somebody_ had better tuck her in. And he doesn't think she'll get into the car at all unless he gets out his phone and makes the call.

When they get to the front entrance, Teal'c is waiting for them. She rolls down the side window and takes the keys, then they clasp each other's forearms. Teal'c says something (in Jaffa, Cam guesses) and she answers in the same language. Teal'c's voice is low. She sounds tired. Or maybe resigned. Neither of them seems quite as happy to see the other as Cam would expect, but Teal'c's a Jaffa and Jackson's ... Jackson. Teal'c lets go, and steps back, and bows. Jackson rolls up the window and looks away. Cam drives off.

At the foot of the access road, she holds out her hand. "Phone," she says, and Cam hands it over. He listens to her side of the conversation with Sam, cheerful and false and leaving out so many of the important things, though he finds out (eavesdropping) that she was arrested for wandering naked around the Smithsonian in the middle of the night, that they found out who she was when they booked her a couple days later, that she couldn't tell them before that because she didn't know.

"When I saw Jack," she's saying, in answer to some question of Sam's. Her tone indicates that whatever it is that she's answering should be self-evident. "It still took a while." There's a pause; Sam is asking something else. "I have no idea, really," Jackson says.

There are a few more moments of pleasantries -- drawn-out for Jackson, who tends to hang up the phone while you're still talking -- then she folds the phone shut and drops it between his legs.

He ought to ask her about stopping for supplies -- O'Neill said he cleaned out her fridge -- but she'll say (he thinks) if she wants to. His stomach's rumbling though, so when they get off the highway, he finds a Mickey D's and goes through the drive-through. He orders enough for both of them. She'll eat if she's hungry. He gets her a large coffee without bothering to ask, though, and asks for extra sugar. He hands it over -- carefully -- before they drive away. Sets the bags on the floor in the back, settles his large shake safely in his crotch. The Mustang's vintage, from the days before cup-holders. It's only about twenty minutes more to her place. When they get there, he pulls up and parks. She gets out and looks around. Her Jeep's nowhere to be seen. She looks at him. He shrugs.

"Have to ask someone where it is," she says. Since she isn't walking off immediately, he gets out of the car, grabs the bags of food -- she's got the shopping bag with the pajamas and what's left of the Scotch -- locks up the car, and follows her.

She fumbles at the outer door for several minutes, trying each of the keys in all directions before she gets the right one into the lock the right way up. That worries Cam more than anything he's seen yet: even when she was _absofuckinglutely plastered_ Jackson could work her own locks. She stops inside, looking around until she finds the bank of mailboxes on the wall, and Cam realizes she's looking at it to find out her apartment number.

That's frightening.

Upstairs, at her door, same deal, until he wants to just grab the keys out of her hands and do it for her. He's pretty sure that would get him thrown out, though, so he doesn't. The more he sees, the more he thinks he needs to be here.

She walks inside, stopping so quickly he almost piles into her at the top of the three steps down that trip him more often than not. The place is dark and cold and shut-up musty, so he reaches to the wall and flips the light-switch, and a couple of the living room lamps go on. She walks on down the steps and stands in the middle of the room, looking around.

"Might want to get some air in here," he says neutrally. She walks across the room to the balcony and starts working on getting the sliders open, and while she's doing that, he finds the thermostat and sets it back up to what he knows Jackson will consider a habitable temperature before heading on into the kitchen.

Jackson isn't dirty, but she tends to live in uninterested clutter. Things set down wherever she happens to leave them, piled in plain sight so she'll remember them. Ease and efficiency -- not to mention convenience -- trumps a lot of other things in her world, especially in her kitchen. When Cam flips on the light and looks around, he blinks. Everything's been scrubbed up and put away. The counters are bare. You could probably do surgery here. He sets the sacks on the counter top, finds a plate, digs through one of the bags and pulls out the super-sized fries. Sets them on the plate and grazes haphazardly while locating her coffeemaker, kettle, filters, mugs. Finds the sugar, and has to hunt a while longer before he finds the coffee. It's not what she usually brews, but it's in a sealed tin. Something that would keep for a while.

The refrigerator's been unplugged and chocked open; there's still bottled water in it, though, and he plugs it back in. He opens the coffee, sets up the coffeemaker, starts the brew cycle. The heat kicks in about the same time he feels a curl of cold air from the open balcony doors. Faint traffic noises waft up from the street. He wipes his fingers on a wad of napkins and digs back through the bag for his double bacon cheeseburger. He eats leaning over the counter in case of random drips; he's still in his Blues. From the living room, he hears the sound of the piano. Not playing. Just single keys being struck at intervals. And fun's fun, but he'd really better make that check-in with General Landry, so out comes his phone again.

He calls through to the Mountain switchboard; it's about 2030 now, and they transfer him through to General Landry at home. He makes his report: Dr. Jackson has returned to Colorado Springs, she asked to be taken directly to her apartment so she could rest, she expects to be at the Mountain first thing in the morning (something he hopes is true.)

"She did wonder where her car is, sir," Cam says.

He hears a sound that might be amusement and might be exasperation. "I'm afraid she'll have to ask General O'Neill, Colonel."

"Yes sir. I'll let her know. Good night, sir."

He puts the phone away again, and when he looks up -- catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye -- she's walking into the kitchen. She peers over his shoulder to see what he's doing and plucks a few french fries from the plate. That makes him feel a little better about things. "I got you some stuff," he says, and she smiles -- remote, absent -- and takes the rest of the food out of the bags. She eats a few more french fries, but she's more interested in the coffee. He gets out of her way.

"You said you planned it," he says, when she's got a mug in her hands, because they're alone, in a place where it's safe to talk, and he'd bet the farm on the fact that this is something that isn't going to come up in the debrief tomorrow. She smiles at him -- inaccessible, murderous (he's got her full attention now) -- and answers. Not in English. He's figured out (months ago) that Jackson doesn't think in English most of the time, and when they're alone (when he asks her questions she doesn't want to answer) she answers him in whatever language she happens to be thinking in. But this time she happens to have picked one he knows. _I was looking for a weapon,_ she says in Mandarin.

He turns away quickly, covering it by getting himself a cup of coffee, hoping she won't guess that he can follow what she's saying, because he knows this game: she wants to tell, but she doesn't want anyone to know. She's colloquially fluent, much too fast for his rusty DLI skills, but he can catch a few phrases here and there. Something about 'others' and 'alliances' and 'brothers.' And that whatever she tried to do didn't work. Then the cadence of her voice shifts, and it sounds like she's quoting something, and it's still Chinese, but whatever she's saying now, Cam can't follow it at all.

"No plan of battle ever survives first contact with the enemy," she says, switching back to English. The official answer to his question, not that it's much of one. Cam knows the quote: Eisenhower and Napoleon both said it, in various forms. It's also known as Murphy's Second Law of Battle.

She finishes her coffee and sets the cup in the sink (Cam thinks he should have hunted out her drainer while he was digging things out, and wonders where O'Neill put it.) Then she rubs her eyes, pushing her glasses up on her forehead, and he sees her flinch when she touches them. And he's not sure whether it's because she'd forgotten she was wearing them, or because of what they represent. And he's not even sure how to start that discussion.

She raises a hand. _Come on? Go away? Don't worry?_ He's not sure how to interpret it; she's back inside her own head, and it looks as if it's crowded there. But when she walks off, he's made up his mind. Bed, couch, or out in the hall -- he isn't leaving. He spends a couple of minutes putting things away. He switches off the coffee but doesn't dump it out. If she wants coffee in a hurry (and sometimes she does -- or did, the last time she was alive) she'll either drink it cold or microwave it. He puts the leftover food into the refrigerator, checking to make sure it's on its way to getting cold (it is.)

The air in the place is changed out now, so he goes and closes the balcony doors. No sense in trying to heat all of Colorado Springs all night. He shuts off all but one of the living room lamps, takes off his jacket and lays it carefully over the back of the couch, and follows Jackson into the bedroom. Her bedside light is on, turned down dim, and she's lying in bed, covers turned back, stark naked. He supposes he should take that as an invitation -- one thing he _will_ say for Jackson, she's never led him down the garden path and then pretended she wasn't. He undresses carefully, folding his pants over the back of the chair in the corner, hanging his shirt over it. He'll be a little rumpled going in to work in the morning, but not too many people will see him before he's changed, and everybody's going to be looking at Jackson, anyway. He walks over to the bed -- still wearing his shorts -- and as he does, it strikes him that hey, his girlfriend's just come back from the dead, and here she is naked, and he really could be a whole lot more _on-board_ with this than he is.

When he's standing next to the bed she stretches. Looking up at him. "Take, you, and eat. This is my body, which is given for you and for many for the expiation and remission of sins," she says.

The words hit him in the pit of his stomach, and Cam feels cold and sick. Sacred words, and she knows exactly what she's doing (undoing); what she's saying to him. "You don't say that. You don't _get_ to say that--" His voice breaks, and he realizes he's passed anger and is on his way to panic. He doesn't want to believe what she's telling him might be true, and he sinks to his knees because he just can't keep standing, and all the while his mind is screaming at him that he can't kneel to her, can't _pray_ to her.

"Mitchell," she says, and the mockery is gone now. She rolls over to the edge of the bed, coming close. "The gods--" she stops. "It doesn't matter, what the gods are. What gods there are. If there are gods. What matters is what people make of them." She reaches out and presses her hand to his cheek. Not a caress; she's pressing firmly, and when he pushes his face against her palm it doesn't move. Solid and real. "I'm..." She stops again. Trying to find words, Cam thinks, somewhere between truth and lies, but more (he thinks) truth. Just not one she's used to telling. "There are a lot of strange things in the universe. Some we'll understand when we see them. Some we'll mistake for something else. I went away. I came back."

"You _died,"_ he says, because it's a fact he has to hold on to. "I was there. We all were."

"Yes," she says. "I died, and I came back. That's all."

"And was that part of your _plan?"_ he asks. He hates himself for being angry, but it's better than being afraid.

"I'm not sure."

And the fact that she isn't sure -- because Jackson's always certain about everything -- brings him all the way back. No more angry at her or afraid of her than he can't help but be, and able to tell himself that he's glad to have her here. Relieved. She strokes his cheek; an atypical caress. He wonders if she missed them (missed him.) Missed being alive.

He couldn't actually fuck her right now if his life depended on it. Can't imagine getting hard. But after a few more minutes he pulls himself to his feet, and finishes stripping off, and gets into the bed. She wants him to lie on top of her, so he does, and she doesn't seem to care that he's soft. She tucks his head into the curve of her neck, and strokes his scalp absently, and finally he falls asleep.

#

He startles awake with a gasp. Hasn’t spent the night in Jackson’s bed in a very long time, and he isn’t used to it any more; the sound of the night freight woke him. He’s asleep on his stomach on the other side of the bed, and for a minute -- pulling himself back to alertness in the context of his improbable life -- he's not entirely certain where he is. As for where _she_ is, his assumption, when he's three-quarters awake, is that she's gone off to the living room couch. She doesn't really seem to like to share a bed. But a hand settles on his shoulder with such quickness and certainty that he realizes she wasn't asleep. It's not a caress, not a pat; she just puts her hand on him and _presses,_ as if clear plain touch is the most important thing. _Maybe it is,_ Cam thinks.

He's not sure what to do now, but she doesn't move her hand, so he settles again, because if he doesn't know what she wants, he's at least clear on what she _doesn't_ want, and cuddling and snuggling and any kind of kissing that isn't heading straight for sex is pretty much always high on the list. And he realizes that while it's his _job_ to be brave, that bravery is another of his tools, like hand/eye coordination and 20/20 vision and being able to lift heavy things (and being brave doesn't mean not being scared, not at all, it means being scared and doing the job anyway), he's been terrified down in the dark secret places that he doesn’t let himself go (ever/almost ever) from the moment that he heard Jackson was back. Because he can understand a machine reanimating imperfectly-cooled flesh, or even aliens healing something that thinks it's already started to rot. But she _burned._ He saw it (smelled it; dreamed of having smelled it) and there was nothing left, and there was nothing while the moon grew full and he drove out into the cold red desert and listened to the coyotes sing to it, nothing while he fucked Jackson's best friend ( _his_ best friend; listened to tales of Jackson fucking her), there was nothing for three months of absence, of not-body, of death, of _nothing,_ and that's not just a hiccup of mortality, that's being dead long enough to take a _really damn fucking good look around._

But now he lies next to her, listening to her even (wakeful) breathing, feels her hand pressing against his flesh, and the fear fades, something manageable again. Wherever she was, whatever she remembers, there's been no harrowing of Hell. So he drifts back to sleep again, and the next time he wakes up, the bedroom is filled with light, and he's pressed against her, wrapped around her, as if she were Sam, as if this weren't her bedroom (a place he's never slept with her, not this way), as if this were some morning before ... whatever it is, precisely, that Jackson's done.

_(glorious resurrection,_ says a traitorous voice in his mind. _wrong season for a glorious resurrection; should have been april and not october...)_

Her body is taut -- with wakefulness, though, and not rejection -- and Cam wonders if she's slept at all since she came back from the dead. Wonders if she's ever going to sleep again: there was a lot of medical stuff -- she was thoroughly checked-out in Washington -- but that came back to the SGC by special courier; he hasn't seen it. It occurs to him (belatedly; sure as hell better get back on his game before the next time he goes through the Gate) that Jackson should have been taken -- he should have been _ordered_ to take her -- straight back to the SGC, and he wonders what strings O'Neill pulled so that she could just waltz out of that hospital and go wherever she damned pleased. O'Neill has to have known she'd tie one on in-flight and then want to go home. O'Neill knows Jackson better than anyone on Earth.

His morning wood is pressed against her thigh; he's not sure how she feels about that. He's not sure how _he_ feels about that, about fucking Jackson ever again, although it may be a moot point once she talks to Sam. She's got a hand on his arm. She's been touching him most of the night, he realizes. He'd like to be happier about it, but it's so unlike her. He starts to shift away. 

"You're a religious man, Mitchell," she says, just as if he hasn't just woken up, just as if they'd been in the middle of a conversation. It's not quite a question, only it is. And this is the first time Jackson has asked him any question more personal than what he likes on his pizza in _almost two years._ In ... ever.

"Raised that way," he says. It's not quite an evasion.

"You've never found reconciling your upbringing and your environment difficult before."

He doesn't answer at first, because he's thinking about the long nights lying alone in hospital beds -- sick with pain, sick with drugs, sick with damage. And he'd always been told that God watched and cared and planned, and for the first time Cam had felt forgotten and cast aside. But even then, he hadn't doubted God's existence. "I guess not," he says.

She takes a deep breath. Thinking. "You're from the South, Mitchell. Tent revivals. Faith healers."

"I'm from the South," he says, sitting up and turning his back to her. He thinks he knows where this conversation is going. He knows Jackson doesn't have any religion. He doesn't want to hear her opinion of his.

He hears her sit up, but she doesn't touch him. "You know that some faith healers fake their cures in order to gain wealth and power. They exploit the belief of the innocent for their own advantage. The _Goa'uld_ did. The Ori are no different. Nothing they do is miraculous. They're a life-form with powers we don't have. They use them to present themselves to us as gods. That's all." She's speaking quietly, carefully, gently, and Jackson is always careful with people but she isn't gentle with them. He feels his eyes prickle with tears, and forces them back. What she's saying is the SGC party line. He's tried to believe it all along, but he's seen Priors cause plagues with an outstretched hand; raise up the dead, blight fields, and cause trees to burst up out of the ground, going from seedling to full fruit in seconds. And the Priors have only a fraction of the power of the Ori. "Mitchell," she says, and now she sounds a little annoyed, a little amused, but still gentle. "If the Ori were gods, do you think I could have come back?"

He feels something in his chest ease, something that's been tight for so long he didn't even know it was there. Since before she died, since before the first time he fucked her, since somewhere around the first time he stood in the middle of hundreds of dying alien villagers and knew there was nothing he could do to save them, since he watched a blind man walk among the plague-ridden preaching that only faith would save them and healing them with a touch. "Guess--" He clears his throat and tries again. "Guess not."

"The first purpose of war is to make sure you survive while killing your enemy," she says. He hears her get out of bed. He wonders who it was who taught her to quote Mao and Napoleon and all the other military strategists he's heard her toss off quotes by in the last two years, Sun Tzu and Bismarck and Clausewitz. He supposes he really doesn't need to wonder. "Go make coffee. We don't want to be late."

#

On the drive to the Mountain -- stopping at the same McD's for breakfast -- Cam just about sails through a red light when his back-brain kindly updates him on something that's been nagging quietly at him since last night.

Jackson doesn't have a single scar now.

#

General Landry wants her checked out in the Infirmary before they debrief. That doesn’t take long, because ... what the hell are they looking for? Then the four of them settle in around the Briefing Room table and Jackson starts lying her head off.

She tells General Landry she had no notion she'd be captured. She tells him that while the Orici was holding her prisoner (trying to convert her to the Path of Origin; Jackson says they talked a lot of religion, with Jackson pushing 'free will' and the Orici coming down pretty hard on the side of Origin being the One True Way; Jackson draws a few parallels to the spread of Christianity in the Late Roman period but mostly she leaves that one alone) Sam's invisible friend Orlin showed up (Cam's read that file.) Jackson says he told her that his folks and the Ori used to be the same race and had a little difference of opinion; Orlin's side has protected their 'descendents' (meaning everyone in the galaxy) until Joe Spencer screwed the pooch. As for what the Ascended have been protecting them from, well... the SGC has known since the Priors arrived that the carrot they're offering to go along with the stick is Ascension: embrace Origin and Ascend when you die. Jackson says Orlin told her it's all a lie: the Ori see their followers as nothing more than food. Worship provides the Ori with power, and they don't intend to share it. They're converting people here to gain more power; Jackson says it's her theory that once they have enough, they intend to use it to exterminate the Ascended ("Nothing like a good old-fashioned family feud," Cam mutters.)

"Don't you _know,_ Dr. Jackson?" General Landry asks.

Cam sees her shrug slightly. "We didn't talk much about that. There wasn't time. Orlin was more interested in helping me Ascend."

"And what is that exactly, Dr. Jackson?" General Landry asks. "Ascension?"

She shrugs again. "To leave your physical body behind. To, ah, become like Orlin. Like the Ancients -- the Ascended. Apparently it worked. But I had incentive."

Looking across the table, Cam sees Sam wince.

"I'm assuming I was a test case. And -- obviously -- it didn't work out," Jackson says.

"Well, what happened?" General Landry asks. Starting to lose his patience, just a little.

"General, I have no idea. I burned to death -- so I assume. You were there," she adds, speaking to the three of them, and there's a faint note of apology in her voice for a moment before she continues. "Then I was walking around the Smithsonian with no idea of who or where I was. I didn't start recovering my memories until Jack showed up to get me out of jail about four days later. I'm sure he gave you a full report."

General Landry looks at a paper in front of him. "It says here that you were booked under the name 'Jacqueline Mitchell,' Dr. Jackson." 

Cam blinks. She hadn't mentioned that. Jackson smiles faintly. "I probably asked for Jack and for Colonel Mitchell. I don't really remember. I'm sorry I can't be more help."

Cam's spent a lot more time with Jackson than General Landry has. That tone of voice means they could all sit here until Doomsday and she won't tell them anything more than that. Despite the fact that there _is_ more. _'I was looking for a weapon.'_ When? When she arranged her capture? (He thinks, now, she must have arranged it. She knew -- more than Sam, more than Teal'c -- how risky Kelowna was for her, and she pushed so hard to stay.) Or when she set up her execution? (She knows enough of _The Book of Origin_ to have faked a conversion -- they all do by now.) How could she have known that Orlin would come along to offer her a bolt-hole? Or did she set that up too? Whatever she was looking for, Cam's pretty sure she didn't find it. She remembers more than she's telling, and Cam could call her on it right here. And he knows he won't.

After the briefing, he goes down to his office. Puts his hand on his phone and thinks about dialing. Imagines his side of a conversation he knows he isn't going to have. _Did you decide not to come to the debriefing because you knew it was going to be nothing but lies? What did she tell you? Did you know what she was going to do in advance?_

_Do you know what she remembers?_

He doesn't see a lot of Jackson for the rest of the week. He's not sure whether that's a good or a bad thing. He offers to drive her home again that first day, but she says an airman has already brought her Jeep back. So apparently she managed to find out where it was. Somehow. And that's that.

#

He and Sam go out to dinner once a couple of days later -- at least they mean to. They end up back at Cam's place with takeout Boston Market, and he bitches about how it's a crime against nature, and Sam teases him about when was the last time he really had the time to pitch in and cook. And he's damned if he can remember; either he's too tired or there's no time. Or (up until three months ago) he was spending his weekends doing Jackson instead of dishes, but that's what the evening is about, in a way. Jackson's back from the dead, he and Sam are officially calling things off. Neither he or Sam wants to come out and say so, any more than they actually wanted to say they'd started it up in the first place. Both military born and raised; they can get a lot of mileage out of pointed silences.

Sam makes one last-ditch attempt to save him (from Jackson, from himself; Cam isn't sure either he or Sam really knows what she's trying to do.) Telling him that Jackson's different since she came back in a way Sam can't quite put her finger on (letting him know -- obliquely -- that she's let Jackson in on what she and Cam have been doing while Jackson was dead; since Cam never expected it to stay a secret, having the heads-up is a kindness). She shakes her head when he asks about the 'difference', says Jackson's 'farther away.' She's always been far away to Cam; he wonders if he'll see much difference. He wonders if he'll get the chance to try; sex has always been by her invitation, express or implied, and he really doesn't know what he'll do if she indicates she's available.

On Friday General Landry lets them know they have a mission on Monday. The same snipe-hunt they've been on for almost a year now: trying to find where Merlin-the-Ancient hid his Orichalcum. According to Merlin's phase-shifting diary, the Orichalcum is something his good buddies the other Ascended didn't want him to build, which is why he hid it so thoroughly that nobody can find it now when they really need it. Or maybe he hid it to keep the other Ascended from whaling on him, but since he's nowhere to be seen now, and since there's a shitload of legends about Merlin being locked up in a tree or a cave or something, Cam guesses that whatever he tried didn't work out too well. He knows the feeling.

When he goes home that night -- no different than any other Friday, except that for the first time in a long time he can stop by Jackson's office, and look in, and the lights are on, and she's there -- he's restless and he can't settle. Beer doesn't help, and channel-surfing doesn't help, and then he gets somewhere up above Channel Two Thousand (he wasn't paying a lot of attention when he got his cable hooked up, and as a result, despite the fact he's almost never here to watch his television, he gets every channel in the Western World) where the teasers for the Pay-Per-View porn is. And he figures, what the hey, at least it's something, might distract him. He fiddles around until he gets it going (convenient automatic extra charge to his cable bill; what the hell had he been thinking of?) A guy, a couch, a beer, a Friday night, and a porno film. A nice recipe for mindless relaxation, and it's too damned bad that it doesn't work. He gets hard, sure, but once he gets himself unzipped and his hand around his cock he doesn't even try to beat off. It won't touch what he wants. What he needs. He feels frustration, irritation, and he knows he's damned close to doing something stupid, so he kicks off his jeans and stuffs his cock back in his shorts and turns off the television and goes and knocks back three quick shots of bourbon, one right after the other (he knows damned well he won't get in the car after that.) Then he hauls off to bed, and the whiskey's loosening him up pretty good, so he grabs a towel and the lube (keeping those things at his bedside is automatic; was even after he thought Jackson was dead) and tries it again, because Jesus _Christ_ , the idea that he can't even jerk off makes him angry.

It's better in the dark, without the soundtrack, without the pressure of the manufactured images. He doesn't think he needs to imagine something; he likes the nothingness. It doesn't work at first, and when it does, when it starts to (he's rough with himself in a way he knows he'll hear about later, but at least he'll be able to sleep tonight) Cam knows there's something there, in his mind, something he's thinking about without knowing it's there. But he lets his mind drift, sure that whatever it comes up with will be old news. Only it isn't. When he comes -- when he _finally_ comes -- he realizes he's imagining the sound of Jackson's screams, the sounds she never made when the followers of the Ori burned her to death.

But she never screams. Of course she doesn't. He always gags her. 

He breathes in -- slowly -- breathes out -- slowly -- then wipes himself clean with the towel and rolls over and goes to sleep.

#

Saturday is a repeat of Friday -- minus the single-player sex -- and he feels as if his skin is on too tight. He runs down every possibility in his head, from alien plague, to good-old-fashioned Earth flu, to pre-mission jitters, to that nervous breakdown half the people at the SGC have been expecting him to have since the day he arrived. By midafternoon he decides that the best thing is just to go over to Jackson's and settle things. He's not sure what he's going to settle. Maybe the question of whether he's ever going to have sex again in his entire life.

Her Jeep's there. He has to phone from the car because the downstairs door is locked, and there's no other way to let anyone on the inside know that somebody's on the outside. But Jackson answers her phone, and then she hangs up on him as soon as he tells her he's downstairs, and about ten minutes later -- he'd have waited longer -- she opens the downstairs door. She doesn't ask him how he is, or what he wants, or any other thing like that, but that's typical. He follows her up the stairs and into her apartment, and that would be encouraging, assuming he was certain why he came over here in the first place. He's not even certain (now) that what she did that first night the two of them were back here really counts as a proposition.

She offers him coffee, beer, bottled water. Apparently she's been shopping. The place doesn't look as untouched as it did almost a week ago, but it doesn't look ... right. Things are scattered around, but not in the same way she would have scattered them three months ago. He goes with coffee. It won't be drinkable (it never is unless he's the one who fixes it) but he doesn't care right now. She goes into the kitchen. A moment later she comes out and looks at him and goes back in again, and when she comes out again a few moments later, she's carrying a tray, and it's got two mugs, and a spoon, and the sugar bowl and the jar of powdered creamer, and he takes a deep breath, realizing she's forgotten how he takes his coffee.

"Little things," she says, seeing his expression. "It should all come back eventually."

"What if it doesn't?" he blurts out, because they've got a mission on Monday, and he's got to _know._

"Then I suppose it's too bad I don't have any personal journals going back further than ten years ago," she says. "But I remember everything you'll need. I've been checking what I know against the database all week."

It isn't right for him to be here. Not when he knows how many gaps there are in her memory. How can he know what she remembers? If he asked her outright, he doubts she'd tell him.

"No bag?" she asks. He grips the cup in his hands, wondering just how many different ways she can shock him while they're sitting fully-dressed on her couch. "I told you: I keep a journal. Before you ask, no. Nobody is capable of reading it but me. Not now."

"Uh." He _really_ doesn't know what to say, and it's not as if he's ever really had much of a clue with Jackson. His go-bag is in the car. The _special_ bag is in the back of the closet at home. Didn't bring it. Thought it would be too pointed. Wasn't really thinking at all. "Wasn't sure," he manages to get out.

She smiles, as if there's a joke buried somewhere in all this, and it isn't a very funny one. "You were fucking Sam while I was dead," she says, and it isn't a question, but there's absolutely no emotion in her voice, so he has no idea what she thinks about it. "Good idea. Somebody should--" he marks the tiny hesitation where she rewrites the words in her head "--be kind to her."

"That's over," he says, and for an insane moment he has an impulse to apologize to Jackson for breaking up with Sam.

"Are you going to fuck me now?" she asks, still in the same polite tones, and Sweet Jesus, suddenly his mouth is dry and he's so hard he _aches._ She reaches out and touches his lips with her fingers, and he closes his eyes and opens his mouth and tilts his head forward and sucks them in. Smooth. No calluses.

"Give me your keys," she says a few seconds later, sliding her fingers free. "I'll get your go-bag. You go ahead."

To the bedroom, he hopes to God she means, but while she's frequently confusing, there are only specific situations in which she's intentionally misleading. He manages to drag the key tag out of his pocket, and hands it to her, and she gets to her feet. He waits until she's gone before staggering ungracefully to his feet, gulping down the last of his coffee -- even doctored up it tastes like battery acid, but he wants it right now -- taking the tray into the kitchen and heading on into the bedroom. As he goes, he rubs himself through the denim. Knows he's not really sure what she'll want, but he's not too worried about that. He knows all the things she _has_ wanted in the past, and they can just start at the beginning and work on through them until they get to wherever she is now.

In the bedroom he gets out of his jeans before he gets really uncomfortable, gets towels, checks for lube, turns the covers back, gets out of the rest of his clothes. Gets into the bed and pulls the sheet up over himself. Not shy exactly. More cautious. Hears her come back in, the click of the front door locks. She comes on through to the bedroom carrying his bag, sets it by the door. Undresses, just the way he remembers, with quick clinical efficiency. The afternoon sunlight on a Saturday in late autumn, here in the mountains out west, is as sharp and bright as glass; her body, just the way he remembered (imagined) is flawless, unscarred. There were scars he knew the stories behind, others he only knew the shapes of. All are gone.

She slides into the bed with him and he touches her -- carefully, but determined not to be hesitant -- and he kisses her and she _tastes_ the same, flesh and coffee, and her skin is silkier under his hands than before, but she feels human. It's okay.

He kicks the sheet to the foot of the bed, and she lets him put her on her back and touch her. He doesn't intend it as foreplay exactly, but he wants to know what she wants him to do, and he doesn't think that even having been dead will make her tell him what she wants in bed. There are things he won't do without equipment he didn't bring. Others he can and will do if she wants them. He slides a finger into her. She's tighter than usual. But she's wet, and she pushes up against his hand, so he gives her the weight and pressure she likes, pressing the heel of his palm against the sharp jut of bone, working his thumb back and forth against her clit as he rubs two fingers just inside her cunt. The angle's a bitch on his wrist in this position, but right now they're just testing the waters. Her eyes are closed as if she's listening.

He doesn't think this is it, though -- what she wants, what she needs -- so he eases his hand free and slides it lower, down along the crack of her ass. His fingers are slick enough for a little foreplay; they'll see. He finds the silky sensitive ring of muscle, rubs and presses gently.

And she goes rigid; arches her back and sucks in air as if she hasn't taken a breath in far too long; grinds her hips down, and when she does his finger slips in to the first knuckle.

"Wait," she says, and she sounds breathless. "Wait."

He doesn't move, doesn't even try to pull his finger out of her again. "I didn't hurt you?" He doesn't see how he could have, but she has _never_ told him to stop anything he's doing. Never.

"No." He can almost hear the debate going on in her head -- whether or not to explain -- but apparently she decides she needs to. "Memories come back." Okay, not much of an explanation, but this is Jackson. He'll take it.

Her muscles go soft again -- he can tell it's deliberate; either he's getting good at reading Jackson, or she's getting bad at covering up. Or maybe she wants him to know what she's thinking. He doesn't know which of the three is least likely. He slips his finger free, making up his mind. Position. Angle of approach.

He sits up, gets the lube, grabs a couple of towels. And usually he'd turn her onto her stomach at this point -- or she'd turn -- but not today. Maybe he wants to watch her face. He isn't sure. Normally not much action there. He kneels between her thighs, keeping her on her back, and works at her carefully, and as he does, he sees her eyebrows draw together in a faint frown. Thinking. Or maybe remembering. In this position it's easy for him to rest the heel of his other hand over her cunt, letting the movement of his fingers inside her ass rock his hand against her clit. 

It's the first chance he's really had to just _stare_ at her (he isn't, really; most of his attention is in his hands) but after a while he notices a shadow on the inside of her hip, and a while after that he realizes what he's seeing, because he stared at Sam's often enough.

Jackson has a contraceptive implant now.

It almost makes him lose his rhythm, lose his focus, but he's gotten damned good at focusing since the days when they gave him a 302 to fly, and even better since he came to the SGC. He'll think about what that means later. Maybe _never._ Sure as hell takes a little bit of the edge off, though. Yeah. And he'd be kidding himself if he said it really made a difference to him. Jackson's back from the dead. The rest is details.

It's a while before he can get three fingers up her ass. She's tight. Not resisting him, and he knows this is what she wants. There's a faint flush across her cheeks, and her cunt is wet and open. He's careful and patient, as if his hands are divorced from the rest of his body, the need to go-go-go. It's a familiar feeling, and his mind, wandering down its own track, separate from body and hands, runs it down a few seconds later. Combat. Flying. Heart hamming and mouth dry, and hands oh-so-patient on the controls, because every one of his instructors, long before he'd ever been let to slide into his first cockpit, had dinned into him that what they were giving him the keys to was (in its essence) a fast dangerous expensive _bomb._ And he thinks Jackson has more in common with the things he used to fly than not (volatile, unpredictable) and he wonders if (he really knows) that's part of the attraction.

He wonders just what it is going the other way, since Jackson doesn't fly, and Cam really doubts he's that dangerous.

And then they're good to go, and he slicks himself up, and lifts her hips onto his thighs, and positions himself, and pushes in. The hot slick tightness takes his breath away, and her breathing -- so even, so controlled -- stutters into a series of quick breathless gasps before she gets it under wraps again.

He leans forward, stomach muscles tightening in the beat before he can take his weight on one hand. Her thighs slide over his, off, opening, and she sets her feet against the mattress. Her hips are tilted a little further up than they normally would be if the two of them were fucking face-to-face; he pulls out a little and thrusts. _Nice._ But what he doesn't like is her having this much leverage -- the habit of caution -- so he coaxes at her until she pulls her knees up and he can get her legs hooked over his shoulders. Her hands are still free, but it can't be helped. He's got his arms around her thighs and she's pretty well pinned.

And she's happy to be that way -- as happy as Jackson ever gets, anyway, even in bed -- and Cam knows this is what she wants. He knows what she _really_ wants, too (the things it hurts him to think about), and because he knows them (loves her/won't love her) he lets out the anger and the fear and the loss (left us left _me_ ) enough to really go to town on her ass (won't think about it won't think about that it's _her_ ) and oh God he'll hate himself, won't be able to meet his eyes in the mirror later, but it still isn't enough for her. She's straining, fisting the sheets, trying to get enough leverage to arch but she can't quite manage it. He can hear every breath she drags in, and every exhalation is a gabbled string of swear-words in languages he doesn't know -- desperate, imperative -- and they turn to _Goa'uld_ and he can feel his balls tightening and his come is about to hit him and he's as desperate to get her off as he is to get off and there's only one thing left he can think of. He gets a hand off the mattress -- doesn't matter which, they're both dry now -- and gets it over her breast and clamps his fingers over her nipple and pulls and twists as hard as he can.

And there's the click of disconnect, of silence, as she comes.

#

He realizes he's lying with his head between her breasts. Came, collapsed, pulled out, _zoned_ out (in no particular order, though probably coming was first). And apparently his mind has been ticking along in his absence, because ... that disconnect, that silence ... he's not sure whether it's something real or not, but despite that, he's sure it's something Jackson needs more than food or sleep. Needs it enough to take what anyone else would consider insane risks to get it. He wonders if it was something she could get while she was dead. He wonders if she needed it then.

He wonders which _part_ of what they do gives it to her. Because ... maybe he could give her more of it, if he knew. Right now he'd like to ask her if she's all right, but that's not one of the things that's allowed. She's still breathing. That's as much as he gets. Aside from everything else he gets, because their relationship (for lack of a better word) is a thing he really tries not to think about, and he sure as hell doesn't _analyze_ it, but he does know that while in a lot of ways he feels worse right now than he did while she was still dead, and a lot worse than he did before he walked through her bedroom door, they're things he can live with and sleep on. And how fucked up is that?

"Pizza?" she asks.

"Sausage, pepperoni, and extra cheese," he says against her breast. He has no idea whether or not she remembers, and doesn't want to. He levers himself off her and rolls onto his back.

She grabs one of the towels and tucks it in between her legs before she sits up. Too late to save the sheets -- any kind of sex involving lube is messy -- but not exactly the first time they've made a mess of her bed. She wipes herself off and heads for the bathroom, still carrying the towel. Cam knows she'll do a quick clean-up, get the pizza order underway, let him shower. They might end up back here and they might not, but it's always best not to make any assumptions with Jackson. He wishes, just a little, it was possible to imagine spending the day snuggling with her. He misses it. Try to snuggle with Jackson, though, and you can flip a coin on what you're risking: frostbite or mutilation. 

It's not right to think that way about someone he's sleeping with (fucking), though, and Cam winces: Momma'd reach for the _big_ spoon if she suspected him of doing anything so unkind and unChristian, and once he was aching, she'd make him tell her why he was wrong until she was sure he understood, and then she'd set him something nasty to do so he had plenty of time to think about why her being right was _really_ right. Just the thought of it makes Cam suck air. But more than wrong, the thought's _wrong_ \-- not just bad, but incorrect -- so even though having had it at all is like a bruise, Cam makes himself own it and stop and take a second look at it. Unfair _and_ unkind. He's snuggled up to Jackson before and not been pushed away. She's cuddled right up to him too. It's just that those occasions are rare and brief, and he doesn't think it's really fair to blame her for that (he knows he's right, but _why_ he's right is something he can't quite chase down; leave it for another time). He sits up. She'll be out of the bathroom in a minute or too; probably time to see what the damages to the bed are. 

The stains aren't too bad, but there's more than a little pink to the spots.

He's up off the bed before he thinks and pushing open the bathroom door. Jackson's got one foot up on the edge of the tub, giving herself a whore's bath with a wet towel. Her back is to him. The sink is half-full of water; it's pink. _"Don't,"_ she says, not turning around, and her voice is harder than he's ever heard it.

He thinks about all the things he wants to say, and wonders who else she's heard them from, and why she never wants to hear them again. He looks down at the rug, anywhere but at her. "Wondered if you were planning to take all goddamned day in here," he says levelly, because if he doesn't say something -- anything -- he thinks he might choke.

"Done," she says, straightening up. She drains the water from the sink and tosses the wet towel over her shoulder. "It's all yours, Colonel."

#

He wonders if he's going to get tossed out after that, but no. When he comes out of the shower and dries off he pulls on his shorts and t-shirt for a quick recon; she's in the living room in sweatpants and a T, curled up on the corner of the couch and drinking beer. Tells him the pizza's on its way, so he goes back and drags on his jeans and goes on into the kitchen. He needs a beer, and he might need two, and if that means in half an hour he's downstairs calling a cab, he'll deal with it. He won't drive drunk, but that sure as hell doesn't mean that he won't _get_ drunk.

The inside of Jackson's refrigerator is ... strange.

She prefers the dark beers -- things you can practically chew, that don't smell a lot like beer to Cam, and that (most of them) have names you can't even pronounce. Chocolate? Does not belong anywhere near beer. And pasteurization is a _good thing._ At his place he kept Guinness for her (he could find it; she would drink it) and at her place he took his chances. The inside of her refrigerator (now) holds about eight six-packs, most of them with a bottle or two missing. A couple he recognizes -- her usual thing. Another one's Guinness. There's one of St. Pauli Girl, which is light, so he can't imagine why it's here. Coors, which he happens to think is just fine (but what the hell is Coors doing in her refrigerator?) And Cam decides it's official: when he dies, he's either going to Heaven, or he's going to the Other Place, but what he _isn't_ going to do is come back here if it means one of the things that happens is you forget your favorite brand of beer. "Baby," he says, very quietly, and he might call Sam that, might think of Sam that way, but he sure as _hell_ never lets that word pass his lips in Jackson's presence unless they're both naked and he's on his way to coming. He pulls out a Coors and goes back out into the living room.

When she sees him with it she nods, just a little. "Yes," she says, as if they were in the middle of a conversation, only this time Cam doesn't know what it was. "Those were from ... earlier. If the safety of Earth depends on me being able to select my usual brand of beer at the store, we're all safe."

"Good," he says. He wonders why the hell she's letting him in on so many of her secrets. He feels like he's gone backstage at the magic show and the illusionist is showing him how it's done. Somehow, it doesn't make him feel safer. He wonders what Sam knows. What Teal'c knows. He knows damned well he isn't going to ask either of them. If they don't know anything, it wouldn't be a kindness to tell them (especially Sam); if they _do_ know, it's possible that the only way SG-1 is going to hold together is if they think he doesn't. The only thing he's really sure of is that whichever of them _do_ know whatever it is they know, they need to keep it from General Landry.

He takes a long pull on his beer. _And that,_ he thinks to himself, _is why you get to know. Somebody needs to tell the General everything's fine. When it might not be._ And since he's been lying about Jackson for almost two years, Cam guesses the time has come to lie _for_ her. He wonders if that goes with the territory. Commander of SG-1. "Wish I were," he mutters to himself. He's not in command of _shit._ He told General Landry he'd come to the SGC to join SG-1. General Landry said he was going to _lead_ SG-1. Turned out he was right and the General was wrong. It happens.

"On paper," Jackson says, and Cam realizes she's followed every thought that's just gone through his mind. Maybe she does that all the time, but this is the first time she's tipped her hand about it.

"So -- on paper -- you up for Monday?" he asks.

She shrugs. "We go, we look around, we come back," she says.

"You don't seem very hopeful," Cam says. She doesn't answer that one. "So... I guess you aren't thinking we're going to find the Orichalcum on 299," Cam says.

"No," Jackson answers. "We aren't."

It takes him a moment to realize what she's said. _She already knows they won't find it._ He waits a moment -- practically holding his breath because she's given him a straight answer to what was pretty much a direct question -- before he asks another one, this time outright. "Then why are we going?"

"Agniativi expects us to. We need to do what she expects. For a while." And he looks puzzled -- he knows he does -- and amazingly, that wins him still another explanation. "Her name is Agniativi," Jackson says absently. "The Orici. They call her Agnia. In Ancient, _'agniativi'_ means 'born in fire.'"

He leans back against the couch. "You could have said."

No answer this time, and Cam realizes that the Orici didn't tell Jackson her name. He doesn't want to think about how she knows it. Or about the fact that Jackson is still (again) playing her own damned game against the Ori, and this time it's not just for Earth, but for everyone, everywhere in this entire galaxy. He'd like to ask Jackson what she gets if she wins, but he's actually afraid to.

A couple of minutes later (he's on his way back to the kitchen for another beer) there's a knock on the door. Probably the pizza. Everybody who lives here chocks the downstairs door open when they call for takeout. The security is hair-raisingly lax, but no damned point to trying to get Jackson to move. Sam said once that people had been trying for years; Jackson moved once about eight years ago and apparently has no intention of ever moving again. He grabs a fresh beer for her too and a roll of paper towels. The coffee table hasn't managed to get piled up again yet, and he's glad, because despite the non-stop _strange_ that he's been stepping in ever since he walked through that front door, he's managed to work up an appetite and a clear table will make getting into the pizza easier.

And three slices and a beer and a half later, they're back in the bedroom. She's not in a hurry, thank the Good Lord (Cam thinks about what they say about swimming and eating; it's true for sex too), but she does seem to be determined, and he wonders, just a little, what she's looking for, because he's never in their whole time together felt quite so much like a stack of mission reports. At least 'back to bed' means he gets his hands on her everywhere, and she's a little raw, and sitting's probably not going to be her favorite thing for a while (she was up on one hip the whole time they were out on the couch; it's nice to see she's really full human), but there isn't any more bleeding, and if she was seriously fucked-up inside (he winces mentally at his choice of words; can't be helped) she'd probably be showing some sign of it by now. He'd like to resolve to be more careful, but 'careful' isn't what gets Jackson off. How can he be careful when what she wants is for him to _hurt_ her? Not take her out somewhere and beat her to a bloody pulp. He's seen people do that to her; she didn't much care for it. No. She wants it _here._ In the bedroom. Needs it, and he's known that for a while, and always added 'maybe' on the end of it but the Ori are coming and Jackson is their last goddamned line of defense (not the SGC, not SG-1, _Jackson_ \-- who might not have been crazy before she died but probably is now -- and if everything goes to shit the only thing Cam asks before the Ori get here is enough time to make one call to Washington and blow the last minutes of his career to hell) and there's no more luxury for 'maybe.' He wishes she didn't want it almost as much as he wishes he didn't know she did, but that's just too damned bad.

He finger-fucks her while he's trying to decide whether he wants to fight about condoms. The only people he's had sex with in the last two years are her and Sam, and the only people _she's_ had sex with...

...actually, technically, Jackson's _never_ had sex. If you don't count getting _fucked up the ass_ a couple of hours ago.

He looks down at his hand. Three fingers jammed as far as he can get them into her cunt, and oh God, he'd been thinking she was a little tight earlier, but he hadn't been _thinking..._

"This is not the time to suffer an attack of conscience," Jackson snaps, sounding irritated enough that Cam doesn't think it would really be a good idea to stop what he's doing. It's her version of encouragement. She wants this. So he pushes his fingers in -- hard -- and twists, and he doesn't care how much more she might want, she isn't getting it if he can't tie her down. Up. Whatever it takes so that she can't go after what she's chasing when she isn't thinking quite straight -- because she doesn't, Cam realizes. Not in bed. The closer she gets to it, the more likely she is to do any damned thing at all, and that's why he has to stop her (tie her up, tie her down), and he doesn't even ask himself why the thought gives him such a rush. She's squirming around now, grinding her ass against the bed, and he's hard enough to do her more than a little good, so he pulls his fingers out of her and gets a hand under her hip and flips her over like a pancake. He doesn't even try for gentle; the only thing he cares about is that she comes down again on the mattress instead of on the floor.

She lands on her stomach hard enough to bounce, and he's right behind her, hauling her hips up and thrusting into her cunt. She doesn't want gentleness, but she _wants,_ and this is the only care she'll accept. In his mind (when he takes the thought out later, when he thinks) this stands in for all the other things, the things he can't give her (doesn't want to give her); the things she won't accept from him (from anyone?) He plunges into her, fingers curled around her hipbones, gripping hard enough to bruise, thumbs digging into the top of her ass.

She reaches out, grabs a pillow, buries her face in it. "No, not today," he says -- gasping, panting -- and wraps one arm around her waist to _hold her_ and grabs a fistful of her hair in his free hand and _hauls._ She arches backward -- flailing a little, still holding the pillow.

"Drop it," he growls, and he spreads his hand, clamping it around the back of her neck. "I want--" _I want to hear you scream._

She lets go of the pillow and pushes it away. Rests her elbows on the mattress. Drops her forehead to the bed. And she's braced, immobile, so he slides his hand down her back, over her hip, up between her legs, shifting his grip on her, because he is going to fuck the sounds they both need out of her if it kills them both. And he takes her from gasping, to gabbled obscenity, to howls that sound far more like rage than anything that belong in a bed like this. But he can't make her scream.

He takes her to silence, though. Lying along her back, panting, done, his fingers jammed against her clit, forcing flesh against the bone as he works her, and when she comes (finally comes) her spasms push his softened cock right out of her. He flattens his fingers over her and presses as she rides it out. Knowing she's bruised (he bruised her). Hoping for no worse.

He rolls off her. Exhausted. Wrecked. Manages to get organized enough to haul the sheets and blankets up from the foot of the bed and when he looks over -- the bedroom is shadowy; it got almost all the way to dark while he wasn't paying attention -- he sees that Jackson is still on her knees and elbows. She hasn't moved.

For a moment he can't quite make up his mind what to do, then he says _okay, fuck it._ He needs to know if she's okay. He rubs his knuckles against her shoulder. "Baby? Freaking me out here."

And she sighs and lets one shoulder drop and rolls slowly onto her side, her back to him. And Cam figures he'll take that as proof of life. So he pulls the covers up over both of them, and a few minutes later she rolls over the other way and crawls into his arms.

#

On Monday they go to P35-299. The place calls itself Camelot. The people there have never heard of the Orichalcum, but they _do_ have a collection of knights off questing after the Sangraal, which earns Cam a nice long lecture about _that_ from Jackson, and the fact that he's watched _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ more than a dozen times is apparently no help here at all. But the locals _do_ remember Merlin, and not fondly, and apparently he used to live here, so SG-1 gets to sneak around and break into Merlin's Secret Lab (don't ask why a bunch of people who apparently _hate him_ seem to have kept the place in pristine shape for half-a-dozen centuries or so; none of this makes any sense to Cam). There's another Black Knight door alarm, and this time Cam isn't the only one who gets his ass kicked before Jackson figures out how to shut it down; a couple of villagers get killed too. SG-1 is not-really-politely asked to go home.

#

That weekend, Cam spends Saturday morning in Jackson's bedroom with a stepladder, a studfinder, and a bag of tools. When he finds the cross-beam in the ceiling, he drills a hole and then screws the metal hook he bought into it. Once it's set, he hangs from it until his fingers ache, lifting his feet off the ladder. It doesn't shift, and it doesn't pull free.

She comes in as he's vacuuming up the debris and hands him a beer (she keeps Coors on hand for him now and he's not sure what to make of that). She doesn't glance at the modification to her ceiling, doesn't comment on it. Cam tries not to think about it either. He doesn't want to imagine using it. He shackles her to the bed and fist-fucks her instead. She sucks him off before he ties her down. Down on her knees, down on the floor, hands gripping his thighs.

But the following weekend he's got her back in the cuffs -- the good heavy black leather ones lined in glove leather -- and they're linked together, and he's picked her up and hung her over the hook like a piece of meat. The ceiling's high. Even when she's dangling at full extension, her feet don't touch the ground. He thought they wouldn't.

His special bag is on the bed. Everything comes out of it at the beginning and goes back into it at the end, even the things she bought (the things that would come to light for the first time -- neutrally, without comment, without explanation -- when he arrived in her bedroom). He doesn't think there will be any more of them in the future. No more need for her to drop hints. He knows the way they need to go now.

She's naked, and he can see the flex and play of the muscles under the skin. Not helpless, because with enough time left alone she could probably swing herself off the hook, and even now, she could kick him if he isn't careful. She probably isn't going to, but he's not quite sure about that, and he thinks about ankle cuffs to match the wrist cuffs (he saw some in the catalog he's got now) and then he thinks about what he could tie them to besides the foot of the bed. He runs a hand down her side, thinking about what they both need. He needs to get off. He needs to get _her_ off.

There's always such a fine line in what they do, and he's never completely sure of how to walk it. Flying by instinct. Flying blind. Tie her up? She's always been fine with that, right from the beginning. Gag her? Not a problem. But he knows if he ever tried to blindfold her it would be all over. For some reason, that's something unforgivable. He knows she wants him (needs him) to hit her, hurt her, but God help him, Cam suspects, if he ever tried to _spank_ her. He wonders if she'd limit herself to gelding him, or if he'd catch a bullet in the back of the head the next time they went through the Gate.

He's standing behind her. He takes a moment more, just touching, because it's something she isn't that fond of -- doesn't permit except on rare occasions -- but she's not sure what's coming, and she thinks she might like that a lot, so right now she's willing to cut him a little slack. He hasn't gagged her yet, and he knows she thinks that's a little odd (he refuses to think about what that whole sentence says about his sex life; he just won't), but then, he's never hung her from the ceiling on a _meathook_ before, either.

He gives her a gentle pat on the hip before he walks away, bracing her with his other hand when he does so she doesn't start swinging. Walks over to the bed. To the bag. "You'll like this," he says as he opens it. He's talking to her, but his voice is barely a whisper. His hands are shaking. Sweating. He wonders if that's why guys who do this as a regular thing wear gloves. He wipes his hands on his jeans.

The riding crop is lying right on top. Almost the last thing he put in. He nearly hadn't brought it. He bought it at a tack shop downtown, pretending to himself he was going to go riding, some kind of riding involving bowler hats and itty-bitty saddles and high polished boots. Not the kind of thing you usually see in this part of the world, but it takes all kinds, and they'd had the gear. Leather, they said, over a fiberglass core for added spring. He swallows hard before he picks it up. He hit himself with it when he brought it home -- on the leg, through his pants, just to see. It had burned like fire.

The Ori burned her to death.

He walks back to her, around the front this time, holding it in his hand. She glances down, and her eyes flicker. She looks away. He sucks in air.

"I am going to hit you with this. Tell me now if that's what you want." He needs consent. He needs permission.

Silence.

"Jackson!" He's praying the answer will be 'no,' that she'll glare at him, that she'll say: _For God's sake, Cam, what are you playing at? Take me down from here and take me to bed._ But she doesn't. She takes a deep breath, and meets his eyes, and nods.

No reprieve.

He stands facing her, and realizes he has no idea of where to hit her, or how, and if she's thought about this, she certainly isn't going to help him out. Thighs, he decides. Outside of the thighs. A lot of muscle and meat there to absorb the damage, and he doesn't know how long the marks will take to go away, but at least she won't have to sit on them. He braces her with his hand, just the way he did before, and delivers the first blow. And despite his best intentions -- despite knowing this is what she wants, what she needs -- he pulls the strike at the last moment. It's barely a tap. It doesn't even redden the skin.

She throws her head back and laughs.

And -- Dear Sweet Jesus -- he's never heard Jackson laugh out loud this way before, and he doesn't want to hear it now; the idea of finding out what Jackson considers truly funny is too much to bear. It isn't hard at all to bring the crop down a second time with all the force in his arm, to do it again and again and again, until there are five bars of red along the outside of her thigh from hip halfway to knee. And she hasn't stopped laughing, so he steps behind her, digs the fingers of his free hand into her hip as hard as he can, and does the other side too. _There. Now you match._

She drags in one last lungful of air and falls silent. He drops the riding crop to the floor (couldn't hold onto it another minute if he tried) and takes a staggering step forward, wrapping his arms around her waist to hold himself upright. He rests his head against her back, breathing hard. Her skin is moist, but it feels cool against his flushed face.

"Fuck me," she says. "Mitchell."

He groans, tightening his arms around her, because the moment she opened her mouth and spoke he got so hard that he'd do her right here if he could, but she's hung just a few goddamned inches too high for that. He lifts, and hauls her off the hook, and when her feet hit the floor she gasps and staggers and starts to buckle but he doesn't let her. Drags her over to the bed and tosses her onto it crosswise and face-down, kicks off his shoes and shoves off his pants and plows right into her without even taking off his shirt, and she's _dripping._

He's got one hand under her working her clit, and the other hand stroking down her thigh, feeling the welts come up. She can't get up on her hands because her wrists are still clipped together; he lays out on her full-length -- thrusting -- and watches the sunlight glitter over the metal on the leather on her wrists and drives his cock into her again and again, and he listens to her pant and groan and swear, and feels her come, and makes her come again, and feels her start to struggle and fight him when he won't take his hand away from her cunt, and he's so close now that he doesn't care any more, so he slaps his other hand down hard on the outside of her thigh and she rears back fiercely enough to bend him back too, her cunt sucking at his cock, and as he comes, in that instant of clarity, Cam thinks there has to be a kind of safety in knowing he can't hurt her no matter what he does.

He lies against her back, his shoulders set, his elbows pressed against the sheets. The fuck drove them halfway across the bed, but their feet still dangle off the edge. Not quite comfortable. Not uncomfortable enough to move. He kisses her shoulder, nuzzles at her neck; Jackson smells like ocean, salt and clean and sharp. Her muscles are soft. She isn't struggling now.

Eventually he moves, kneeling up to get at her wrists. Jackson mutters wordless complaint when he lifts off her; Cam has never understood what she finds attractive in the sensation of being crushed. He doesn't understand a lot of things about Jackson. And some of the things she's taught him about himself are things he wishes he'd never learned.

When he unclips her wrists she rolls over on her back, gets a foot up on the bed -- taking care, because he's still kneeing over her -- and kicks up until she's all the way on. She holds her arms out to him invitingly, her face soft, her eyes heavy-lidded. And Cam goes, fitting his body over hers. When she puts her arms around him, he can feel the cuffs bite into his skin.

It's not the last time they do this (each time he swears it's going to be, but she needs it). He gets better at it. Finds the right leather strap to hook her cuffs together with so that she'll hang just low enough so he can fuck her (afterward) without having to take her down. When he fucks her hanging, she wraps her legs around his waist and he digs his fingers into her ass and it's a wonder they haven't pulled the damned ceiling down, because he isn't crazy enough to let her get the strap loose and her hands free until he can keep his full attention on her instead of between her legs, so he always pulls her tight against the hook. She's sweet with him afterward; that's what (he thinks) makes the other possible: gentle and loving (when he takes off the cuffs, when he takes out the gag -- because after the first time he gags her -- after he's lifted her down and taken her back to the bed) and he could forget about all the rest of it if he couldn't still see all the marks he leaves on her flesh, with the crop and his belt and a long wooden rod. But she holds him afterward and strokes him and lets him lose himself in her for a little while.

He's not sure which of them is lost.

#

The worst of all their missions is thinking (knowing) that Jackson knows more than she lets on. That she's playing a fucking _chess game_ with the Orici while planets go Ori and people die. And he'd like to go off on her for it -- he dearly would -- except for the fact he thinks it may be driving her as crazy as it's driving him. Assuming, of course, that you believe that Jackson came back sane.

They're both wound up too tight. And he realizes (has known; hasn't thought about knowing) that he's Jackson's lifeline. Her safety-valve, because there's something going on, and he doesn't know what it is, but he sees the wide-eyed blankness that her face gets when they bring the bodies of the SG Teams back through the Gate (or don't, because there aren't any bodies, or not where they can find them) and he knows it's killing her to wait. And he doesn't know what she's waiting for, but he knows it's his job to help her hold on (hold out) until whatever it is shows up.

Knowing what she needs from him isn't the same as being able to provide it. He's actually started doing _research,_ which seriously creeps him out. Half the stuff he comes across is hot as hell. The other half is sickening. He's a little afraid to find out which half does it for Jackson (really does it) because the thought of something he can't deal with being something she needs ... _hurts._ He wants to give her what she needs. He needs to. He's not sure he can.

One afternoon in her bedroom, both naked, on their way to something else, he puts a hand on the back of her neck and slams her to her knees in front of him. Not thinking. Not intending to be rough with her. A blow-job was on the menu. Not this. And he hears her sigh, feels her _surrender_ under his hand, lean in and nuzzle at his groin and stroke his thighs, pliant and yielding and as soft as he is hard, and he's not quite sure he likes what he's learned about either of them.

#

He's got her in four-point bondage, meaning she's shackled hand and foot to her own bed and can't move a muscle. Something he's checked -- carefully -- because it's important. It's important, because he's got a knife.

He isn't going to hurt her. Today, right now, pain isn't the point, though he's got a selection of clamps spread out on a towel beside her, and the implied promise (he means to keep it) is that he'll use them later.

The knife in his hand is as sharp as a razor. That's the whole idea: the damage it _could_ do. It's heavy and gleaming and the metal is cold. He runs the flat of it all over her body. Down her arms. Over her thighs. Across her belly. Slides the flat of the blade over her nipples. Rests the honed edge (gently, carefully) beneath her breasts. Even so, even with all his care, it leaves a faint red line, but that's all right. He wants her to know it's sharp. When he presses the other edge -- the flat edge, the _safe_ edge -- against her throat, he sees her swallow. Her eyes flicker, and he knows she's thinking about moving. Won't do her any good though. He puts his free hand on her forehead, holding her still, and runs the dull edge of the knife up and down her throat.

Now it's time to give her more. Not as much as she wants (he's not sure what her stopping place would be; he thinks he knows), but as much as he's willing to give. He takes the point of the knife and traces it over her body again, over all the places he's already mapped out with the flat. The point is sharp (tested and tried; he's been tested and tried), leaving white lines that flush slowly pink as they swell. There's no blood. He doesn't break the skin.

She pulls against the cuffs, demanding more, but she can't get it (can't make him give it). There's just enough play in the way she's secured that he stays away from veins, arteries, tendons. He hasn't gagged her (not yet), but the only sound in the room is the creak of the leather and her ragged breathing. When he finally sets the knife aside she whines in protest, though her body, from elbows to knees, is a map of long pink lines. She shakes her head in frustration.

"Another time," he says, stroking her leg. The skin is hot and a little uneven under his hand. He's not quite sure what he's promising, or what it will involve: keeping her safe in every way 'safe' means is becoming a more elaborate balancing act each time he takes her to bed. He picks up the first set of clamps. Pulls and rolls her nipples, one after the other, until the clamps are settled into place. Carefully tightens the screws. How much is enough? How much is too much?

"Is this good?"

He makes her talk. It's the hardest thing for her here, but he has to hear the words. He can't know what she's feeling, and he worries (constantly) that she won't tell him when he crosses the line between pain and damage. Making her talk to him keeps them (he thinks, he hopes) on the good side of that line, because it's something he's forcing her to do, something she hates, and that's what she wants as much as all the rest. There are all kinds of ways to inflict pain. He waits, and when he doesn't get an answer, goes to take them off again.

_"Yes,"_ she says. Furious. Breathless.

Cam nods, and leaves the clamps where they are. _Good girl,_ he thinks, but he can't quite bring himself to say it. Not yet. Maybe someday, because he knows it will infuriate her, and he's starting to think that's part of the point. Not that he hasn't seen her (almost) lose her temper more times than he can count, hasn't seen her white-lipped furious (but on the job). And 'almost' isn't the same as 'actually' -- Cam thinks that's one of the things they're here for. So she can lose control. Isn't that why he's tying her down?

There are almost two dozen clamps laid out (as if they're surgical instruments) on the towel that's spread out on the bed. All the ones he owns (he thinks of them as his, because he's the one who keeps them, but they're hers, really). He laid them all out in advance because he hadn't made up his mind which ones he wanted to use. It depends. Sometimes he uses almost all of them. Today he's going to go with something simple. The big ones, spring-driven, the ones that look like Satan's clothespins. He picks up a couple, and her eyes flicker as she sees what he's chosen. (She could stop him with a word, and he knows she won't.) He reaches between her legs, pinching the lips of her cunt apart. She's wet, the flesh is wet, slick and fragrant and beautiful, but somewhere, somebody took that into account when they designed these things. Cam hears the snap-hooks rattle over the rings in her ankle-cuffs as he eases the first clamp into place. First one side, then the other. Then a second set, then a third, then a fourth. Clamped all along the lips of her cunt, black and glittering. He saves the best for last (he doesn't censor himself inside his head; he's too carefully focused on what he's doing). It looks more like a hemostat than it does like anything else: the jaws are lined with rubber, the pressure's adjustable. He's careful and precise as he settles it over her clit and squeezes it shut. 

Done. And now to time it out (carefully) and watch her (carefully) and he knows she'd rather be gagged for this, sees the tension in her neck and jaw where she's keeping the sounds she wants to make now all swallowed down. Every muscle is tense, but her breathing is even, because she's controlling that, too.

But he won't let her have the gag yet. He still holds on to the hope that if something went wrong (started to go wrong) she'd stop him, _tell_ him. He doesn't want to accept (he's known the truth for a while) that she really won't. Because what does that mean? Not about him so much -- it would be his fault, and he'd never forgive himself, but it would be an accident. But Jackson -- she'd know what was happening, and she'd never say a word. He flicks the handle of the long silvery clamp with a finger, making it jiggle, making her suck air in sharply and fling her head back. He feels a mixture of anger and aching tenderness and a desire to fuck her till she _screams._

"You know," he says aloud, and his voice is rough, "I could just walk off right now and leave you here like this. You wonder how long it'd take someone to find you?"

She lifts her head slowly to look at him. As if she's drunk. Drugged. Her pupils are wide, only a thin ring of blue around the black, though it's late afternoon and the room is warm and bright. She licks her lips before she answers; speaks slowly -- as if she actually means him to understand -- so it takes him a few seconds to catch up to the fact that it isn't English. German this time. And he doesn't speak a word of German, but he spent enough time being deployed through Germany that he knows what _'Todt'_ means. It would just be nice to know if she's threatening to kill him, or telling him she'd be dead. It doesn't matter, though, because he'll never do it. They both know it.

Her eyes close and her head drops back again. Her skin gleams damply in the sunlight, and the chain between her breasts (between the clamps) glitters and shifts as she breathes. Each inhalation is deeper now. Time to move on soon. So much of this is about giving her what she wants, and he's doing his best. But at its best (worst) doing for Jackson just seems to remind him that there are things he wants too, and what sucks about that is that Cam doesn't think there's one damned thing Jackson wouldn't do for him in bed or out of it (at least if it was sex) if he could just figure out how to _ask._

He doesn't know what to ask for.

He rests a hand on her thigh, stroking the skin. The muscles jump beneath his hand when he touches her, but she can't move. Her flesh is moist, silky, covered with tiny welts. He put them there, and he can't feel just one thing about that inside: can't hate having done it, or love it either, and the worst is, it was his idea, really. Something new, because maybe (please, God) it would be a little safer, a little less destructive, than the things she pushes for so hard. The marks will be gone in a day or so (he thinks); the larger welts and bruises (he knows) take a week and more to fade away completely. He doesn't even know _how they got here_ from where they started out. Each incremental step seemed obvious, natural -- not only irresistible but desirable. And the parts that don't freak him out (none of it freaks him out too much to actually _do_ it; that's the part he doesn't like to think about) obsess him to the point that he thinks about them every safe moment, turning the images over in his mind in bed before he goes to sleep. He never knew he wanted these sorts of things until Jackson showed him that he did. He still doesn't think they can be right. (Of course, where he comes from, guys who do guys aren't right either; that's another thing Cam doesn't let himself think about a lot.)

Time's up. And she won't want the clamps to come off, either, so before he removes them, he picks up the last item he's set out here. They began with silk but now it's rubber and leather. He kneels over her, strokes her cheek with the back of his fingers. Her eyes open, and when she sees what he's holding, she opens her mouth obediently. When he fits the rubber ball between her jaws and goes to buckle the strap firmly in place along her cheek, he can feel her whole body loosening, relaxing. She's done what he wanted. The gag is her reward. 

He doesn't know when he started thinking of all this in terms of 'reward' and 'punishment', because God knows he doesn't want to _punish_ Jackson: their daily lives are punishment enough. Left over from all the Psych reading in his classes maybe, because you don't get to be a Leader of Men -- or a potential Leader of Men -- without getting a few of those. They said being a leader was his job; he thought of it as his privilege. Privilege to serve -- his country, the lives his country placed in his care. And he guesses he's doing that now, every time he ties Jackson up and _beats the hell out of her._ Only he isn't, or (really) that's not the _point._ He's trying (she's trying) to get inside her skull and just _turn things off_ for a while, because you can't keep going and going and _going_ all the time. And even if she's letting him do this for her (it ought to be intimate, but it really isn't), there are still secrets she doesn't want to give up. She can only really relax when it's impossible for her to speak.

He flicks the clit-clamp one last time, and this time he hears her groan, the sound muffled the way she wants it to be. He removes the clamp and sets it aside. Her arm-muscles tense, and her head whips from side to side; he doesn't give her a chance to adjust, but jerks the rest of the clips off her cunt quickly. Her head goes back; she strains in reaction: the leather creaks and the metal fastenings click faintly as they slip and twist, but there's no way she can get free. The clips hurt going on, and they hurt coming off (he tried a couple of them on himself -- on his arm -- just to see) and he's not quite sure what part of all this is the part that she wants. During? After? Having survived it? It can't be having it _done_ to her: Cam's pretty sure that if Jackson could manage to get this to happen without having anyone else here, she would.

Her cunt is open and swollen, and oh God, she's so wet he's sure could get his hand right up inside her without lube. He closes his fingers, presses his fist against her cunt, over her clit, pushing and twisting, and feels her strain and hears her muffled howl. And he wants -- he _wants..._

But if he doesn't know what that is, at least he knows what he can have, and so he eases back -- he hears her snarl, deep in her throat -- and loosens the tension on the ankle cuffs, changing out the short straps for longer ones one at a time. There'll be too much pressure on her hips when he fucks her otherwise, and he means to do that. He'll leave the nipple clamps for a while more. Not too long. The books he's read have warnings about that. When she feels the slack, she pulls at the ankle cuffs until the straps are taut again. Arching.

He knows what she wants. It's where they've been heading for hours, ever since they walked into her bedroom and she stripped off her clothes and lay down on the bed and held out her arms for the first set of cuffs. But he thinks of it as _his turn_ now (why?) so he kneels between her thighs, running his thumb slowly up and down over her clit. "Said I could leave you like this," he says, almost whispering. "Said that."

She's fighting the cuffs now, all out, and if she could just get free -- if she weren't gagged -- the first thing she'd do would be bite. Neck, or maybe traps. Draw blood, too, and she'd mean to. But she can't. Can't get free, can't bite. Helpless, powerless, _bound._

"Got you," Cam says, stroking her. "Got you right here. Let me tie you up like this, never thought about what I might do, did you?" She's bucking under his hand, trying to throw off his touch. But while there's some play in the ankle straps, there's not that much. "Fixed yourself real good, didn't you, baby?" he says, and he doesn't know where the words are coming from, just that they're _good,_ they're _right,_ they feel like hands on his body and a mouth over his cock, and he needs to be _in_ her and he needs to keep doing this. He reaches down with his free hand, the hand that isn't on her, and squeezes his cock. Hard enough to let him hold back, to stay here just like this for a few minutes more. "You should see yourself," he says, and his voice is rough and low and husky and there's heat and pressure in his chest, fire sliding through his veins like whiskey and flying and love. "You should see yourself right now."

The sounds she's making are intense. Frantic. He wanted to make her (let her) lose control, and he has. Sweat is trickling down her face, down her neck, her skin is damp and strands of hair are plastered to her cheeks. And suddenly she goes still and stiff, and he realizes she's coming. Already. And he wants to be in her when she does, so he stops what he's doing, mounts her, drives into her, grinds against her. Her cunt clutches around him, sucking at his cock as he thrusts, and he left 'reasonable' behind a long time ago; he wants to hear the sounds he knows she'll make if he does all the right things, and so he twists the chain on the clamps (the last pair of clamps) as he fucks her, and jerks it, and pulls it taut. And finally he loosens the clamps (a little, not too much) and yanks them free, and they click and rattle as the chain swings in his hand, and the sound, the _sound_ that Jackson makes in the heartbeat after they come off--

\--the sound is what makes him come.

He lies against her, body-to-body, close enough to kiss (if he hadn't gagged her), resting on his elbows, gasping for breath. And her eyes are closed, she's lying as if she's dead, that isn't new. But something is. Cam can feel it.

He likes sex. Sex with women, sex with men -- hell, he even likes sex with _Jackson._ But this is the first time (with her) he's felt pumped up afterward. Not dragged down, knowing that later when he thinks about it he'll be wishing he could be dishonest enough with himself to say 'never again.' This time he just feels good -- _damned_ good -- like he's just gotten laid in the best way instead of the most fucked-up.

Happy.

And all he really wants to do right now is roll over and _sleep,_ but there are things to do first. Not many, but vital.

He drags himself to hands and knees. Gag first. His hands are slow; no left-over adrenaline this time, he just feels like he's been hit in the back of the head with some kind of baseball bat that didn't hurt. He eases the gag free and drops it on the towel with the clips. Rolls the towel up and puts it over the side of the bed. Things to be done with the contents, but that can wait. Unclips her wrists from the bedposts. She's completely limp. The foot of the bed seems as if it's a million miles away, but he's got to get there, and he does. One ankle, then the other. He leaves the cuffs in place: he doesn't think Jackson's actually passed out, but this, the _silence,_ is what they both work so desperately to get for her. It's not worth disturbing.

He pulls the sheet up over both of them, lies down beside her. Housekeeping's done and he can let himself drift. So _good._ If what she gets is anything like this, no wonder she chases it so hard.

Whatever it is he did to her today (whatever she got out of it, whatever he _gave_ ) it was something _right_ , because Jackson hasn't moved an inch since he unclipped her -- (and she always does, at least a little, even if the sex is good) -- and he realizes she's really down. Not just relaxed, the way she gets. Out cold. He stirs himself enough to ease her arms and legs into a more comfortable position and even that doesn't rouse her. And that's _good_. Because he feels great, and it worked for her, and there's barely a mark on her. 

A little while later Cam feels her shift, settling herself more comfortably, then shift again, fitting herself against him. It always makes the rest of it all right (even when it isn't), to have her do that. When she does that, it tells him that she's gotten what she wanted (what she needed). He never feels he's being paid off, simply because he doesn't think that it would occur to Jackson to do it. Jackson does one hell of a lot of things she doesn't want to do, and damned near all of them are in uniform. On her own time, she's terrifyingly honest. So this is honesty. Even if what she means by it isn't quite clear.

He's figured something out today, he thinks. Only he doesn't know (not yet) what he's figured out. But this he does know: what you do once you can do twice. He'll just have to mull it over for a while.

#

About two and a half months after Jackson's come back from the dead, SG-1 pulls an Earthside mission. Someone named Charlotte Mayfield has turned out to be a _Goa'uld_ , and she manages to escape but she leaves behind a nice warehouse full of offworld loot. SG-1 is sent off to help the NID do the ID and inventory.

Jackson twitches the whole way to New York, and Cam doesn't think it's the flying, because she fusses the whole way to Brooklyn, too. When they get to the warehouse, Sam's checking in with Agent Barrett, and Cam thinks he's managing to keep an eye on Jackson, but the first thing he knows he's hearing "Don't touch that!" followed by a yelp of pain, and the yelp isn't Jackson's. He whips around, and she's on the other side of the warehouse beside an open carton. She's got something in her hands, and there's an NID agent glaring at her looking as if he's not quite sure he's brave enough to take it back. Cam hotfoots it over there and slops the guy all over with sugar. It half works -- the agent stops glaring -- and Cam would really like to tell Jackson to _apologize,_ but somehow he doesn't think she would. So he settles for telling Agent Nichols how happy SG-1 is to be here, and how much they're looking forward to cooperating fully with the NID. He glances over Jackson's shoulder to see what the hell was so damned important. It's a piece of black stone about the size of a sheet of letterhead, and the writing's Ancient. Too damned bad nobody in this galaxy can read Ancient. At least in Atlantis they've got a Speak'n'Spell to translate for them, but that's not the same as being able to read the street signs.

"What'cha got there?" he asks Jackson. _And how'd you know it was here?_

"Nothing much," she says dismissively. She sets the stone down on the table and walks away.

#

_"Clava Thessara Infinitas_ \- the Key to Infinite Treasure," Jackson says that evening, when they're all together in her hotel room and Sam's swept it for bugs. "That's what the tablet is: supposedly the key to a map leading to a vast storehouse of riches hidden away by the Ancients before they Ascended."

"You can read Ancient now?" Sam asks in astonishment.

Jackson shrugs. "Doesn't matter. There's no map and no storehouse. The _Clava_ is gibberish. All it contains is the coded Gate address for the world which holds the Orichalcum."

There's a long moment of silence, because none of them can really believe that Jackson's actually said what she's just said. "Then let's--" Cam says, and stops. 

Teal'c nods. "It would be well to conceal our interest. Ba'al may yet retain spies within the NID."

In fact, that's pretty much a certainty. Almost as much of a certainty (when Cam thinks about it) as the fact that Jackson's known this damned Gate address for the last ten weeks, and since they've gotten something more than hints that Ba'al is looking for the Orichalcum too, Cam has _no idea in this world_ why she's held off letting them in on her little secret this long. He keeps his mouth shut about that for just about as long as he can -- they're stuck for another two days in New York -- and that gives him a chance to decide on the best place to have a little chat with Jackson about full disclosure. Not her apartment or his. There's always an outside chance somebody could be listening, and this is a hell of a lot more critical to National Security than their sex life. The SGC's the safest place -- there's video everywhere, but no audio, and it's not that hard to angle yourself so that your face doesn't show on camera.

"Why?" he says, coming into her office and closing the door.

She gets to her feet -- it looks perfectly natural -- and walks over to her bookshelf. Her back's to the camera now. She doesn't bother to ask him what he's talking about: either she's telepathic or a really good guesser, and it's probably not that hard to figure out the question he wants an answer to anyway. "The Ascended have rules. It's why the Ori sent Priors; it's why they created the Orici: Ascended beings cannot interfere directly on the lower planes."

"What Orlin did with you isn't interfering?" he asks.

He can't see her face, but she shrugs. "That would be ... a loophole. Helping someone Ascend. The reason the Ori don't break these rules is because the Ascended -- the _other_ Ascended -- would immediately attack them for it. They punish anyone who breaks their rules _very_ harshly."

"Doesn't seem fair."

"Feel free to argue with them." She sighs. "Using information you gained while Ascended is against the rules." She stops. She knows he's smart enough to figure the rest out. And he is: she _knew,_ all right, but she couldn't tell them, couldn't act as if she knew. Had to wait until something else, some _pretext,_ fell into her hands.

"What would they do?" he asks, because this is something he doesn't know.

She shrugs again. "I'm not completely sure. But I doubt the concept of 'punitive damages' is entirely unknown to them."

Cam nods. It makes sense. It sucks, but it makes sense, and it pretty much explains ... everything. If Jackson had known for sure what they'd do, it wouldn't even have slowed her down: she's always been willing to put her life on the line. And maybe she'd even have thought that a few other peoples' lives would have been worth paying too, because the Ori and their band of circus freaks are nasty bastards. But not knowing quite what the Ascended would do meant it wasn't worth the risk. Not yet.

#

The next day SG-1 goes off to Jackson's Gate address. There's another RenFaire village on the other side -- the locals call it Carbonek, which amuses the hell out of Jackson for reasons she doesn't bother to explain -- and Jackson takes them straight to the local Lending Library to ask for directions to the Orichalcum (Cam guesses she's still playing by the rules, because she _must_ know exactly where the Orichalcum is, right?), where they find out they're one jump behind Ba'al (which means no map -- because Ba'al's already stolen it -- though they _do_ get a look at a really nice 'Parchment of Virtues'). And about the time they're pinned down in the local saloon in the middle of a shoot-out with a bunch of Ori troops who just happen to be in the neighborhood, Cam's thinking: _Screw the Prime Directive,_ because he is _really_ tired of jumping through hoops while the galaxy burns down around his ears. But apparently the Chief Librarian, a guy named Osric, had a crisis of conscience watching the Holy Warriors burn all his books (something that makes even Jackson queasy), so -- since Osric knows the map backwards and forwards -- he decides to help them find the Orichalcum.

During their brisk twenty-mile hike to King Solomon's Mines (Sam and Teal'c get the joke; it's lost on Jackson and -- of course -- on Osric) they unravel two traps (one stasis field, one force field, and that pretty much explains why the locals haven't gone off to find the Orichalcum years ago), pick up one slightly-used _Goa'uld_ System Lord, and find out that Osric is really the Orici. Jackson seems more irritated with Ba'al than surprised by the sudden revelation that Osric's really Pope Joan in disguise, and the Orici doesn’t seem surprised at all to see that Jackson's come back from the dead. When they get to Merlin's Cave, the Orici comes right out and says she needs Jackson to get the Orichalcum: she wants it to take out the Ascended, and from what little Jackson's said, once she does, that means they'll have Ori (and not just their second cousins) right in their laps. Not good.

And it'd be nice to think that Jackson wouldn’t cooperate with a plan like that, but the woman doesn't even have to _threaten_ her, so Cam never finds out whether or not the Orici could have gotten into Merlin's Cave without help. Off they all go, and Cam really wishes all to hell he'd just _shot_ Ba'al back in the forest, except ... dragon. (And Jackson didn't shoot him either, so either there _is_ a dragon -- like Pope Joan said back when she was pretending to be Osric -- or there's some other good reason not to shoot him. Cam takes what comfort he can from listening to Ba'al and the Orici play 'more-evil-than-thou' while the rest of them work their way through the Ancient security system. The Ancients had _way_ too much free time.)

One dragon later, they're face-to-face with a freezer full of Ancient and no Orichalcum in sight. The good news is, they've lost the Orici when they beamed in here. The bad news is, they've still got Ba'al. They thaw Merlin out -- the old guy's confused; calls Cam 'Lancelot' and Jackson 'Vivian' -- and it turns out that there isn't any Orichalcum because Merlin's good buddies the Ancients destroyed the last one he built. The only place it exists is in Merlin's head. 

Cam wonders if Jackson knew that too.

Good news? Merlin remembers how to reconstruct it and Jackson can coax him into it, once she explains about the Ori. There's a machine on the wall that lets Merlin think things out of thin air, and he gets right down to cases. Jackson says he's building matter out of its component atoms; Cam figures that's going to take a while (it does: hours). Bad news? Merlin's too weak to actually get the job done, and trying to do it kills him (worse news: Merlin's lab is bouncing around among a stand-alone network of Stargates now, and they can't dial out while it's doing it). Good news? Merlin can save the blueprints to the same Ancient face-hugging hard-drive he's using to build the Orichalcum, and he does before he dies. Bad news? The information can only be used if you _download it into somebody's brain._ Worse news? Both Merlin and Jackson have apparently decided it's going to be her brain.

Cam knows they almost lost O'Neill twice to something pretty much like this, and Merlin's dead, and Jackson's eyes are lit up and she's saying something and all Cam's hearing is 'download.' And _they have to have that weapon._

He watches her walk over to the wall and feels as if he's committing murder. But Jackson's said the Orici's tracking them, and that means they're on the clock, because it's only a matter of time before she tracks them here. They don't have time to waste trying to come up with a better idea. Sam and Teal'c are outside, at the Stargate -- with Ba'al -- trying to figure out how to get it to take them home. Cam's just glad neither of them is here to see Jackson microwave her brain. He wishes _he_ wasn't. She sticks her face into the device and there's a flash of light. He catches her as she falls.

And she's hurt, he knows she is: first she calls him 'Lancelot,' and then she calls him 'Cameron', and he doesn't know which is worse. But then she tells him -- babbling animatedly, and -- oh _God_ \-- she's smiling, she looks relieved; Cam doesn't want to guess at the things she hasn't told him -- that she has Merlin's memories now: limited (non-fatal) Ancient information, enough knowledge to finish building to Orichalcum.

"I can see it now. I can do this. It's okay, Cam, it's okay."

_'Trust me. I can handle this.'_ She tells him that a couple of hours later, but she's also levitating canteens, and she can barely keep herself upright when she stops to rest, and nobody gets fancy mind powers without major redecorating going on inside their skulls. The fact that she's successfully materialized what she calls the 'first stage' of the Orichalcum doesn't make Cam feel any better, either. It doesn't look anything like they thought it would: more like a Roomba than, well, that little piece of jewelry they've been after. And Sam isn't any closer to shutting down that subroutine that's shunting them around so they can _get the fuck out of here._ Or more to the point, to have the SGC send every single Marine they've got here to back them up (wherever the hell it is they are), since it's going to do them no damned good at all to leave before Jackson's done building her Tinkertoy.

#

Six more hours, and Cam's gotten used to the light-show, gotten used to listening to Jackson sing to herself in what sounds like Latin, gotten used to being called 'Lancelot' and 'Cameron' and half-a-dozen other names, gotten used to listening to her laugh and pluck at a beard she doesn't have. Even deals with the look on Sam's face, and Teal'c's, when they walk in and see what Jackson's turned herself into. And Jackson sees it too, and Cam watches her struggle for five minutes until she can remember enough English to tell the two of them it's going to be all right. That she's just a little confused right now. That letting Merlin's memories run around loose inside her brain is something she has to let happen, but it isn't going to kill her.

And Ba'al's looking smug -- he's there too; they aren't going to let him out of their sight -- and she looks at him (and for just a moment Cam thinks it's _mostly_ Jackson in there), and hisses something at him in some language that makes Cam's throat hurt just to _hear_ it, and flings out her hand, and Ba'al goes flying across the room and hits the wall with a hard _final_ sound.

"His symbiote will heal him," Teal'c says calmly. And he picks Ba'al up, and slings him over his shoulder, and he and Sam go back outside and Jackson goes back to work.

#

"Stage two," Cam says (to himself, no one else is really there to listen). Easy guess. Another chunk of ... _something_ ... has just materialized out of thin air and floated down onto the first part. There's a hologram -- maybe of the whole thing -- swirling in the air over the landing platform: if it's any indication of how far they have to go until this thing is finished, they're going to be here ... a long time.

Each time Jackson pulls her head out of the thing on the wall, all the glowing lights vanish. This time she staggers backward, off balance, and Cam rushes -- again -- to catch her. "I'm not as young as I used to be," she says, and it doesn't even sound like Jackson. It sounds like his grandfather, and the disconnect between what he's touching and what he's hearing makes his skin crawl. When he gets her to the chair and kneels in front of her, it takes her a long time to focus on him.

"I know you," she says, sounding surprised and pleased.

"C'mon, baby," Cam whispers. He reaches for her, and she takes his hand, carrying it the rest of the way to her cheek.

"Everything's covered in ice," she says vaguely, and she sounds a little more like Jackson and a little less like ... not Jackson. "Jack?" she asks, looking around.

"He'll be along later," Cam says, swallowing hard. The moment they get the Stargate working, Cam bets. If he has to teleport in from Washington. And the first thing he'll probably do when he gets here is _shoot_ one Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Everett Mitchell.

Or maybe not.

They _need_ this one, and General O'Neill knows that as well or better than Cam does. They're losing Jackson, and he's watching it happen, and there's not a damned thing he can do about it, and he wouldn't do anything if there was. Because this is SG-1, and the hard part about what they do isn't risking their own lives. It's standing back and letting their friends (lovers) do the same.

And around about Hour Seven -- Cam thinks it's been about twelve hours now since they defrosted Merlin -- she whips her head out of the facehugger fast enough to make him jump. "Get to the Gate. Now," she says, and she sounds wide-awake and alert and that scares him more than everything that's come before it has. He takes a step toward her. "They're coming! _Go!"_

"Move it!" he says in return, but Sam and Teal'c are out there, so he doesn't wait to see if she does.

He hears gunfire before he gets to the entrance, gets his weapon up and comes out firing. Sam and Teal'c are pinned down; the place is full of Holy Warriors, and Ba'al's sprawled out on the ground looking pretty close to dead. Cam rolls into cover and keeps shooting, but the odds aren't good: the Gate's active, probably dialed in.

It's dark and it's foggy, but he's still pretty sure there's no cause for the lightning that comes down out of the sky. It hits every single Ori Warrior, and nothing else, and the wormhole collapses. Sam's running for the DHD, shouting about dialing out, and Cam's turning around to head back into the cave, because _Jackson has not followed him,_ when suddenly she comes flying out, and she isn't running. She's been _thrown._ She hits the ground and skids through the leaves, and the Orici is right behind her. Cam whips up his P90, and starts firing at her, but his bullets just bounce right off something that looks like and probably isn't anything like a _Goa'uld_ personal shield.

And Pope Joan raises her hand -- she looks pretty and innocent and young and vulnerable and only one of those things is even remotely true -- and it fills up with red fire, and Cam thinks _'hellfire,'_ and knows he's about to die, they're _all_ about to die, and it's an interesting question exactly what he's going to go to Hell _for._ He'll have to ask when he gets there.

And the Orici throws her fireball, but before it gets there Jackson slams into him, knocking him out of the way, holding up her hands like she's saying 'stop', and Cam just _stares_ as the Orici's hellfire bounces off. "Get to the Gate _now!"_ Jackson shouts.

"We're not leaving you here!" Sam shouts right back, and Cam can't stand the thought of losing Jackson twice, he _can't,_ but the Orici's hitting her with everything she's got -- there's a solid column of fire between the two of them -- Jackson's the only thing keeping the rest of them from getting _fried_ \-- and there's no way she can break off what she's doing to retreat. He drags himself to his feet.

"I'll be right behind you," Jackson says as he starts moving. Her voice is loud enough to be heard over the sizzle and the crack of the fire she's catching in her bare hands, but her tone is almost conversational, and somehow Cam knows she's lying. Sam's got them dialed out now and he runs toward the Gate. The other two go through first, and Cam wants to stop, wants to _wait_ \-- just a second, just a goddamned _second_ \-- but he feels as if he's being pushed through.

The three of them come stumbling down the ramp on the other side, and Sweet and Merciful Jesus, it's last summer all over again. They've lost Jackson. Again. And they won't get her back, Cam feels it in his bones: not this time, the Orici knows what Jackson is now, knows what she can do, knows she _came back from the dead,_ knows she can build the Orichalcum. Jackson's going to die and then so are the rest of them. Everyone in the galaxy. 

General Landry asks where Dr. Jackson is, and to Cam's horror, he starts to laugh.

#

Dr. Lam prescribes a sedative (it isn't optional) and confines him to on-Base quarters for the night. SG-1's preliminary report is brief, anyway: they've been up over twenty-four hours, and what is there to say after they say they've lost the Orichalcum and Dr. Jackson? Not one fucking hell of a lot.

#

He wakes up however long it is later feeling as if pigeons have died in his mouth (which always happens when somebody slips him a sleeping pill), but not as if he's about to burst into tears and start cutting out paper dolls, which is kind of a relief. He rolls over in bed and realizes he isn't alone in quarters. When he gets his eyes open and sees who it is, he doesn't need anything else to finish waking him up.

"So I understand you had a big day yesterday, Mitchell," General O'Neill says.

"Oh, my--" _fucking God._ "I mean, sir, I--" Cam sits up, and thinks of getting out of bed, and thinks better of it, and tries not to _think._ Because Sweet Suffering Jesus: yes. And he doesn't want to think about it any more than he wants (right here, right now) to think about the fact that he sucked O'Neill off in a shower tent a world and a lifetime away. And even if O'Neill knows it was him, Cam is sure as hell _not_ going to bring the subject up, any more than he's ever going to mention the fact that last weekend he tied Dr. Jackson to her own bed and...

"Mitchell?"

"I'm sorry, sir," Cam says. He rubs a hand over his face. _I lost her. Twice._

"So. Want to share?"

When a two-star General asks you if you want to 'share,' you do _not_ get to say 'no.' "I, uh, the Orici made our position. Jackson covered our retreat. Sir."

"Yeah." O'Neill sighs, and Cam tries to remember just what the hell the three of them told General Landry last night, all of them dead tired and kicking themselves six ways from Sunday. "Sir, have you talked to Colonel Carter yet?" Cam asks hopefully.

"Thought I'd start with you. Coffee," O'Neill adds, and Cam realizes there's a cup on the bedside table. He picks it up and drinks. It helps.

"We found Merlin," he says, when he decides he can't delay any longer. "Ba'al was ahead of us, but he'd walked into one of the Ancient booby-traps." And Ba'al's Jaffa either got caught in another one they managed to miss, or got mopped up by the Ori shock troops somewhere along the way, because whatever happened, they didn't come back for him (Cam wonders if it was because he wasn't the real him. Who the hell knows?) "We took him with us, because he said he had information we needed. The guy we brought along as a local guide turned out to be the Orici in disguise." He gets all the way through it: dragon, defrosting, death, download, and desperate losing gamble. O'Neill doesn't say a word until he's done.

"From what you say, Merlin gave Dani some pretty valuable intel. And she's been in enemy hands before. She'll know how to use what she knows to keep herself alive and play for time. She knows you'll search for her."

For a moment it's all Cam can do to keep himself from saying: _are you crazy or just stupid?_ He wants so badly to think that Jackson has a chance of survival that he doesn't dare believe it's possible. But maybe it's true. Cam thinks that O'Neill wants Jackson to be alive probably as much as he does. But he also thinks that no matter what lies the man might tell himself, he wouldn't tell them to someone else. Not knowingly. And this much is true: the Orichalcum wasn't finished. Merlin is the only one who can finish it, and Cam knows that the Orici wants it. A lot. So if all these things are true, then maybe one more thing is true too: Jackson's alive, and will be until the Orichalcum is finished.

"We'll find her, sir," Cam says.

"Great," O'Neill says, as easily as if he hadn't just dropped everything and flown halfway across the country when General Landry made the call he must have made. O'Neill gets to his feet, glances at his watch, tells Cam there's a debriefing in an hour and ten minutes, and lets himself out.

O'Neill isn't at the debriefing. Sam tells Cam (later) that General O'Neill dropped by her lab this morning on his way out of the Mountain, just long enough to tell her that she shouldn't worry too much. As far as Cam can figure out, O'Neill flew all the way to Colorado to bring him his morning coffee, find out (face to face) just what happened on P7X-SNAFU, and to close up Jackson's loft again, because Cam asks about that right after the briefing is over and (again) he's told it's taken care of.

Most of the SGC spends the next two months looking for her.

#

It's not as if they have anything better to do. Or _should._ It's not a case of a missing teammate (if it were, General Landry would just write her off; the harsh necessities of war) -- it's a case of looking for their missing superweapon. Jackson -- or what's currently living in her head -- is the only thing left that can build the Orichalcum.

The followers of Origin don't build prisons, but they _do_ build palaces, and any Jaffa can tell you that there's not a lot of difference between the two if you're someone the guys who built the palaces don't like. The SGC does as much as it can to get into as many of them as possible. Jackson isn't in any of them.

Cam works a lot of eighteen-hour days -- coordinating searches -- Sam builds a lot of gadgets, Teal'c goes out with other teams. All of them coping the best way they know how. About a month after they've lost her, the SGC starts hearing vague reports about a female Prior, the first they've ever heard tell of. It takes the SGC a while to get close at all, and at first, it's just close enough to send a team to one of the worlds she's preaching on. SG-12 doesn't stay to see her (standing orders are _still_ to avoid all contact with Priors), but they're told by the locals that she isn't preaching the Origin party line: she talks about Origin as the path to true salvation, but she's coming down hard on all the advantages of it, and not once mentioning the little fact that the Priors will wipe out anyone who doesn't convert. It's true that the SGC doesn't know that it's Jackson. But the Orici would sure as hell rather convert her and parade her than just kill her if she could: it was what she tried to do the first time. SG-12 gets the date and time of the Prior's next show. SG-1 goes to take a look.

It's Jackson, and they can't even be grateful she's alive, because she's a _Prior._ Hair and eyes and skin all Prior-pale: not even white, just colorless. She looks like a dead thing, as if there's no blood in her veins at all. (Cam knows that the symbol of the Ori is fire; he's always wondered why the Priors aren't ... brighter.) And the only upside to _any_ of this is that, Prior or not, Jackson apparently hasn't finished the Orichalcum for some reason, because they aren't hip-deep in Ori yet.

Earth has managed to build exactly two working Anti-Prior Devices. SG-1 (minus one) Gates home, loads one on board _Odyssey,_ and arranges to be there with it the next time Jackson shows up to preach.

#

"Not the welcome back I was expecting, guys."

In a compartment on-board the _Odyssey,_ Jackson's just woken up from a zat-blast. She's shackled hand and foot to a chair. The Anti-Prior Device suppressed her powers from the moment she was beamed aboard. It's running now.

"Dani?" Sam asks. She's hoping -- the way they all are -- that this is really the miracle it looks like. Only in this war, miracles (so-called) are the enemy's stock in trade, not theirs.

"Hello-o-o-o?" the woman in the chair answers mockingly. She doesn't sound like any Prior they've ever met; she sounds like Jackson. On the other hand, they've never seen any female Priors -- just the Orici -- so maybe Jackson's the Anti-Pope. His momma would smack Cam for being so disrespectful of other folks' way of believing, even if it's really the Ori he's going on at. 

"This is a shock," Sam says. Jackson just smiles. "You ... gave in," Sam adds helplessly.

_"Jolinar,"_ Jackson says, and Sam flinches.

"Hey," Cam says, because he's not quite sure what Jackson's getting at there but it doesn't sound as if it's very nice. "Want to tell me what's going on?"

"Want to stop treating me like the enemy?" She strains at her shackles and then shoots him a knowing look: 'shackles' don't mean 'enemy', not between him and her. "When the _fuck_ are you people planning to believe I'm me? Mitchell? Sam? Teal'c?"

Cam has to admit that she _sounds_ like Jackson. And the Orici looked and sounded a hell of a lot like Osric, too.

"You were indeed Danielle Jackson once," Teal'c says, and Jackson bangs her head against the back of the chair in frustration.

"We do not have a hell of a lot of _time_ here!" she snarls.

"You got some place you gotta be?" Cam asks. 

Jackson smiles at him coldly. "My spiritual leader and I have gotten very close. She likes to tuck me in at night."

About then Merlin comes out to play, which is a damned good thing, as there's a guy on the bridge of _Odyssey_ with his finger on the button that will beam Jackson out into space, and Cam's pretty close to wondering if he ought to give the order. Merlin explains that he protected Danielle Jackson from _actually_ being brainwashed by the Orici. (Who doesn't know that Merlin -- as a person and not just a stack of files -- is _in_ there.) That the Orichalcum is nearly ready to be used. That the two of them (him and Jackson) used their apparent full cooperation to give them the leverage to get the Orici to do _one little thing_ for them in return.

"I needed Agniativi to make me a Prior so I could steal her ship and fly it to the Ori galaxy and destroy them. You wouldn't understand the science, Sam, but trust me: the Orichalcum will take out _all_ the Ascended Beings in whatever galaxy it's activated in. I _know_ there's a wormhole blocking the Supergate and that's why I arranged to be captured. I need you guys to shut it down," Jackson says reasonably.

It'd be nice to believe her. But. If they shut the wormhole down, the Ori will be able to send more ships through, and the half-dozen that are here now are trouble enough. They can't know that killing off the Ori will stop their shock-troops: if they do what Jackson wants, they could end up ass-deep in Holy Warriors whether or not they're ass-deep in Ori too. 

Cam isn't really surprised to find that General O'Neill is not only at the SGC by the time the _Odyssey_ reaches Earth, but also expects to come aboard immediately. What does surprise Cam (just a little) is that as soon as they've met him at the rings, both Sam and Teal'c find really good reasons to be somewhere else. The General doesn't tell Cam to take a hike, though, so he follows O'Neill back to the holding compartment.

#

"Never used to wear makeup," O'Neill says, walking in (dismissing the two corpsmen guarding Jackson with a flick of his fingers). 

"You damned stupid sonovabitch," Jackson snarls. "When are you all going to get your heads out of your collective asses and realize I'm _me?"_ Okay, she doesn't look much like a Prior right now (except for being chalk-white), but she doesn't look really _friendly_ either.

"Oh, hey," O'Neill says, pulling over a stool and sitting down beside her chair as if he's got all the time in the world. "There's the whole 'you've been off working for the Bad Guys for the last two months or so' thing. Makes it kinda difficult."

She slams her head against the back of the chair one more time, closes her eyes and laughs. "You defected to the Trust."

"Let's not dwell."

"No. Let's. You lied to me and you betrayed me and you left me to twist in the wind, so I think you owe me a certain level of trust now."

Cam thinks he knows why Sam and Teal'c decided not to be here. This is about the fate of the entire galaxy. None of them knows if they can believe a single word that comes out of her mouth. Jackson is making it all about personal friendships, past histories. And Cam knows it can't be.

"Dani, have you looked in the mirror lately?" O'Neill asks.

She lifts her head from the back of the chair and looks at him. "Every day for the last month, Jack. And if the fucking SGC had been just a _little_ more organized, we wouldn't be up against quite so much of a deadline now, but we are, so why don't we just move on?"

Cam listens to them snarl at each other for a while. (Well, actually, Jackson's the one who rants; O'Neill seems, at most, to be faintly irritated.) Jackson's demanding that O'Neill order the Supergate shut down and let her go. Cam knows that isn't going to happen. When orders and insults don't work, Jackson actually tries a little explaining. She has a plan, and it has a deadline (she said so earlier, of course, and -- of course -- didn't give them any details.) Her plan hinges on being able to fly the Orici's ship through the Ori Gate back to the Ori galaxy with the Orichalcum on board, something only a Prior can do. It's why she manipulated the Orici into turning her into a Prior in the first place (did she know the Orici would be on Carbonek when they went after the Orichalcum? Did she know the Orici would hunt them down before she could finish building it? Did she know she'd be captured?) and she was willing to do that because...

...it's going to wear off. Soon. The Merlin-download is temporary. It was never meant to last forever (if it did, she'd die.) It's enough like the Prior-thing that Merlin was able to tie the two of them up together: when he disappears from Jackson's brain (undoing everything he's done to her since she took the download), he'll undo the Priorization, too. She'll be human again. And if her plan isn't in play by that point (Jackson says), the Orici will have the Orichalcum and it will all have been for nothing. It's finished, but Agniativi's held off having Jackson put it together because she's afraid that the Ascended will come and take it away: she's been working on getting together a nice Ascended-sized distraction to occupy them at the critical moment. But even without Jackson around, she can figure out how to finish it.

Jackson tells O'Neill she'd expected them to capture her sooner, that she couldn't just walk away from the Orici and back into their hands. Cam isn't so sure. O'Neill wants to know what her deadline is: Jackson finally admits to a day, more or less. Cam would like to believe she wouldn't lie to O'Neill. He's not sure. And apparently O'Neill isn't sure either -- although he seems to have one hell of a lot of confidence in their Anti-Prior Device -- because once he's got that much out of Jackson, he baits her until she just ... _loses it._ Tells her he isn't sure it's her, tells her the plan isn't going to work, tells her she's lying, tells her he doesn't believe her whether she's lying or not. Cam isn't sure what O'Neill's looking for, and he sure as hell doesn't know if he finds it. She shouts back at him at the top of her lungs, demanding he believe her, demanding he believe _in_ her, until O'Neill just gets up and walks out, motioning for Cam to follow.

Clock's ticking.

Cam knows (they all know) that no matter which way they decide, they have to make up their minds soon. Jackson has a deadline, but so do they: the Anti-Prior Devices only work for a limited time, after which the Priors figure out their way around them, so they really need to know which side Jackson's on before they can't hold her prisoner any more. O'Neill takes the three of them back to the SGC with him, where they find out that apparently, they aren't going to get the chance to make up their own minds about whether or not to trust Jackson: the IOA knows what's going on, and Woolsey says there isn't going to be any more discussion. Jackson's going to be killed. End of story.

_That_ meeting is brief. O'Neill says the IOA can kill Jackson over his dead body, Woolsey goes off to get more instructions. Everybody retreats to neutral corners. Cam waits half an hour and goes looking for O'Neill. He finds him just about where he thought he would. In Jackson's office, messing up all her stuff. Picking things up and putting them down. The place is pretty neat after two months of absence. It was also locked the last time Cam went by it. He doesn't even bother wondering how O'Neill got in.

"Sir," he says, as carefully as he's ever spoken in his life. "I think I have an idea. It might sound a little crazy, but all I'm asking is you hear me out." It won't save Jackson. But if it works, it might save the rest of the galaxy.

#

It takes O'Neill almost six hours to get the information out of Jackson that they need. There are no witnesses.

Location of Agniativi's ship. Assembly instructions for the Orichalcum. Codes and a computer interface that will let someone who isn't a Prior fly an Ori ship (that requires a vial of Jackson's blood and one of those Ancient communication devices that started this whole mess, but the SGC's gotten good at building Alien Technology Interfaces over the years; Sam thinks she can make it work). The ship they're looking for is orbiting a planet with a Stargate: Jackson says Agniativi is off on business and her chauffeur preaches to the masses on a regular schedule. There shouldn't be anyone on board. _Odyssey_ can meet them at the Supergate to take them off before the ship goes through, so ... this could work.

When they get to the ship, it's just as deserted as Jackson said it would be. They make sure the Orichalcum is there, then go find the Bridge. The interface is a real DIY nightmare, but it does the trick; Sam's able to lock them into the Command Level and deactivate the rings (just in case of nasty surprises) and then take the ship out of orbit and head for the Supergate. She stays on the Bridge to baby-sit her equipment while he and Teal'c go back and get to work assembling the Orichalcum. Cam wonders if Jackson's dead yet. He doesn't think she'll find a way to come back this time.

They're close to done when he feels the ship joggle and come out of hyperspace, then his radio activates for just a minute before it goes dead. Neither of these things is good. "Keep working!" he tells Teal'c, and goes running toward the Bridge. He meets Sam coming the other way. And oh, the news is worse than he thought.

Jackson's here: beamed onto the bridge the moment the ship dropped out of hyperspace. And even worse, the _Orici's_ here. That's all Sam got a chance to see before _somebody_ shoved her out the door and locked it, and Sam has no idea who's in control of the ship right now, or what side Jackson's even on. But Cam knows she isn't supposed to be here, even if O'Neill managed to get her a stay of execution.

"The Supergate!" he says, and Sam's answering look is agonized. The thing's big enough that when it's active, it shows a visible disk from a really long way away. If she didn't see one, the Gate's been shut down.

If this were a _Goa'uld_ ship, he knows Sam could find the Auxiliary Control Room and figure out what's going on. But they don't know enough about the layout of the Ori ships to do that here. He reaches into his vest and closes his hand around a brick of C-4. He saw windows in the Control Room. Maybe they'll break. Maybe it will help. "C'mon, Sam," he says. "Let's do some breaking and entering."

But nothing they do can get them back through that door; he leaves Sam working on it while he goes back to check on Teal'c, because their radios don't work, and if Teal'c finishes the assembly and turns it on while they're all still on this side of the Gate they'll have done the Ori's work for them. When he gets back to where he's left Teal'c, he sees that the Orichalcum is finished except for the timer, and the whole thing is glowing like a Christmas Tree. While he's explaining the situation to Teal'c, his radio kicks in. It's Sam, telling him to get to the Bridge. Fast.

"Sam! Are we clear?" he asks, because once the timer's in place, any and all Ascended within one galaxy's radius have about five minutes more of life.

"Yes! Cam! Come on!" 

They all have a bunch of sign/countersigns in place to prove to each other that they're them, over the radio and otherwise, and they're all absolutely useless when you're dealing with Evil Alien Telepaths. All along this has been about faith and belief and trust. "Arm it!" he tells Teal'c. The moment the timer slips into place the whole thing starts to glow even more brightly than it had been before. He and Teal'c head for the Ori bridge as fast as they can get there.

Through the open doorway he can see the Supergate coming up _fast,_ and it's lit up, and he just hopes to God that's an outgoing wormhole now. Sam's standing inside the door, looking a little rocky, but she isn't bleeding. "The door just opened," she says, gesturing at the body on the floor. It's the Orici, and she's good and dead. Half her head's blown away (Cam wonders where Jackson got the gun that's lying on the floor -- has to have been what she used -- but he's glad she had it). Jackson's lying unconscious in the control chair. She looks human again.

Sam's on her radio to the _Odyssey_ telling them to beam the four of them out _now._ Cam grabs Jackson up out of the chair and hauls her up over his shoulder as the others huddle in close (Gate's getting closer) and the next thing he knows the four of them're on the bridge of the _Odyssey_ watching the Ori ship slide through the wormhole, and Cam's praying it's carrying a nasty surprise with it.

The bridge is empty. The only one here is Colonel O'Neill.

There's another Ori ship still out there, and Sam dashes across the Bridge and slides into the co-pilot seat, her hand hovering over the Fire Control console. But nothing happens, and they all sit-and-stand around for about five minutes, and Jackson's starting to get heavy.

Finally O'Neill stands and stretches and looks around. "Nothing to see here. Mitchell, take over."

Cam slides Jackson down off his shoulder and Teal'c takes her and Cam walks over to the Captain's chair.

#

Cam spends another hour watching the remaining Ori ship not do anything before Sam comes up and relieves him and tells him General O'Neill said she should set a course for Earth. Did they just win? Or not? He thought it would be more ... definite.

He goes down to Sick Bay. Jackson's in a bed, and O'Neill's sitting on a stool beside it and it's a replay of the two of them in Washington, only this time Jackson isn't conscious. Teal'c's standing by the door like he's on guard. Someone got Jackson into a set of scrubs, and in the Sick Bay lights she looks almost as pale as she did when she was a Prior. Cam isn't really sure what to do with himself, so he folds his arms across his chest and leans against the wall and watches O'Neill watch Jackson. The man's leaning in like he could bring her back from wherever she's gone just by staring at her, and for the first time since ... she took the download, they got her back, they got back themselves, Cam has the freedom to do nothing but worry about her. What if she doesn't wake up? She'd been so sure this was all going to work out, that this was a _good plan._ (Playing a lone hand for God knows how long: setting up her capture, execution, Ascension, return, capture again and all the rest. How much was planned, how much was accident? Does even Jackson know?) Cam thinks back, trying to think of some point when he could have figured out what she was doing, could have stopped her, what he could have (should have) changed. Nothing comes to mind. The Ori are (were? Sweet Jesus, he hopes so) too much of a Big Bad. Any level of risk was acceptable if there was the slightest chance of it ending in victory.

He watches the two of them until O'Neill tells him to go relieve Sam, and later Sam relieves him -- watch-on-watch, an hour at a time, and there's nothing much to say -- and about the time he's wondering how to tactfully suggest that the General go get a cup of coffee, please, sir (because she isn't waking up, and O'Neill looks like he's ready to sit at her bedside until Gabriel plays his fucking _horn,_ and it hurts something deep in Cam's chest to look at that), she takes a deep breath. Opening her eyes.

"Hey, sleepyhead," O'Neill says, and he ruffles her hair, and there's nothing but affection there, and if Cam tried the same gesture it'd get him one of her flat snake-eyed looks, the kind where she's actually seeing you and you wish she wasn't. "What took you so long?"

"What happened?" she asks, yawning, sounding vague and unworried.

"Nothing," O'Neill answers, sounds surprised that she's asking.

"You killed the Orici, Teal'c armed the weapon, you dialed the Gate and sent the Ori ship through, we came back," Cam says.

"Assuming you are indeed yourself, Danielle Jackson," Teal'c says, and Cam realizes, with a feeling like he's caught in an elevator going down too fast, that of course, _this_ is why Teal'c's been here all along. In case she isn't her. In case she's ... someone else.

She says something in some language that makes Teal'c raise his eyebrows. "If I wasn't me, you'd already know," she adds in English. She looks like she's thinking about sitting up, looks like she thinks it's too much of an effort. Her eyes slide around the room, pass over him. "Where's Sam?" she asks, looking back at O'Neill.

"Bridge. Somebody's got to drive the bus," O'Neill says.

Cam figures that's his cue. He goes to the intercom and keys the Bridge. "Sam? Our girl's awake."

"Is she all right?" He can hear Sam's relief even through the tinny filtered audio.

"A little grumpy," he says. He figures he can get away with that because there really isn't any way Jackson's getting out of that bed yet, and she'd have to go through O'Neill anyway.

"Ask her how she managed to cloak _Odyssey_ ," Sam says.

She did, Cam knows. Hid the ship so thoroughly that Agniativi didn't notice it was out there. And then managed to kill her. He looks at Jackson. She looks at him. Raises one hand and wiggles her fingers. Shrugs a little. Merlin's gone, and whatever he knew, whatever he was, he took it with him, Cam guesses.

"Magicians don't reveal their secrets, Sam," he says.

"Well, did it work?" Sam asks, and she's talking -- now -- about the Orichalcum. Their holy grail: Merlin's secret weapon, the Ori-killer. Something Cam could pick up and hold, supposed to be powerful enough to wipe out everything Ascended in an entire Galaxy.

"We'll see," Cam says.

#

When they arrive in Earth orbit O'Neill goes up to the bridge to talk to General Landry, and then Cam and Sam spend a couple of hours beaming _Odyssey's_ crew back on-board before Colonel Davidson beams them down to a secured field at Peterson, where Woolsey immediately tries to place Jackson under arrest. O'Neill tells Woolsey that Jackson isn't a Prior any more, and that the last time O'Neill looked, scaring people wasn't a hanging offense.

"I think that Dr. Jackson--" Woolsey begins.

Cam gets a hand under her elbow -- she's still a little unsteady on her feet -- and steers her toward the waiting van. He probably doesn't want to hear the rest of Woolsey's sentence. And he _really_ doesn't want to hear Jackson's reply.

_Odyssey_ heads back to the Supergate as soon as it's got its crew aboard. They hear later it sits watching the other Ori ship for the next week -- no new Ori ships come through the Supergate -- before ringing people aboard and mopping up the collection of frightened and confused Holy Warriors who are wandering through its corridors.

SG-1, Jackson, and General O'Neill (Teal'c's the one who comes up with the joke about 'The Once and Future SG-1' which stops Cam in his tracks and makes O'Neill stare) debrief forty-eight hours after their arrival back on Earth, when Dr. Lam finally gives Jackson the medical 'all clear' that lets her get out of bed once and for all. O'Neill's at the table, and so's Woolsey, and that's when Cam finds out Woolsey intended to beam Jackson down into the Antarctic stasis pod: the IOA planned to defrost her and let her finish turning back into _her_ if her intel turned out to be sound. Cam suspects they'd always have found some good reason to postpone the day, and Antarctica isn't under US jurisdiction. But she was a lot closer to getting around the Anti-Prior Device than any of them suspected. She took control of _Odyssey_ , beamed Woolsey and the crew down to the surface, beamed General O'Neill up to the ship (right through the shields in the SGC that are supposed to make things like that impossible), and headed for the Supergate. O'Neill says (making it a joke) that she hadn't believed they could complete the mission without her. Since the Orici apparently figured out what they were up to ... Cam guesses she was right. 

Jackson says she doesn't really remember much after she took the download. She says she knows she _did_ remember -- at one point -- but that now, the closest analogue she can draw is to the awareness of reality that some coma patients possess: vague and fragmentary and distorted by dreams. She can't say what -- of what she remembers of the last two months -- happened, and the only people who _do_ know (Merlin, the Orici) are dead and gone. And Cam knows Jackson will lie in debriefings as easily as she draws breath, but he thinks -- this time -- she just might be telling the truth.

It’s not until he's sitting there, in the middle of the debriefing, listening to it all being laid out, that Cam realizes what O'Neill has to have known days before: Jackson’s original plan was to fly the Ori ship back to the Ori Galaxy herself. No _Odyssey_ to take her off at the last minute as the ship went through the Supergate if they'd done it her way. No way to come back, either, if the Orichalcum worked and the Ori were destroyed -- and if her timing was off just a little, if the device was triggered while she was still a Prior, it would probably have destroyed her too. Cam wonders if she'd thought of any of that and decides she probably had.

And as the intel keeps trickling in, it turns out that nobody is seeing a single Prior anywhere. It looks as if Jackson's gamble and Merlin's weapon have worked. They've won. What that really seems to mean is _paperwork,_ and the promise of even more paperwork, and Friday blindsides him: in the wrong place in the week, seems like, and he can't even remember if he's gone home once since they all came back (no) and what he's supposed to do about ... everything. Because all he keeps hearing everywhere he turns is _'the mandate of the SGC will inevitably be changing,'_ and he really isn't sure what that means. Eleven years ago they unburied their Stargate and wandered out into the Galaxy and ran into the _Goa'uld_. Two years ago they opened another Pandora's Box and out came the Ori. And the _Goa'uld_ aren't gone and the Ori have left one hell of a mess behind them and where there are two troubles there are likely to be three, and Cam suspects it's only a matter of time before they trip over the third thing and so it doesn't really seem to him as if anybody's mandate ought to be changing at all. He wonders if what they'll say, years from now, is: _'at least you were there for the end, Mitchell,'_ or will it be: _'for God's sake, Mitchell, why didn't you warn them when you had the chance?'_ He goes home and spends a restless uncomfortable weekend, and it's only late Sunday evening that it occurs to him that Jackson's alive. It's not exactly that he's forgotten it for a minute, not once in the ten days since they first went to see her preach. But there's alive, and then there's _human,_ and _sane,_ and _here_ \-- Jackson has so many intermediate states to pass through on her way to _really alive_ that her being back almost seems like something that's going to happen, not something that's already happened. So the whole weekend passes, and Cam doesn't see any of the rest of the team at all.

The following week they have a mission. Reconnaissance and assessment. Without the Priors, the Ori ships in this galaxy are dead wherever they are, in space or on the ground. What's left is mop-up, and it's a question of who gets to the Ori's shock-troops first: Jaffa, Lucian Alliance, or what's left of the _Goa'uld_. Nobody's really happy with them, and it isn't a war now so much as a rout. On PGI-483, they run into a bunch of Holy Warriors and face them down without having to fire a single shot. Jackson rattles off verse after verse of _The Book of Origin_ looking really pissed about the whole thing. Some of them -- Jackson says they call themselves the Chosen -- remember her from when she was a Prior. They're confused when they see her, but glad she hasn't gone up in flames like the others. Some of the rest remember her from when she was executed: Cam isn't sure whether that's a help or not. The SGC is scrambling to set up detention camps so they can keep the Chosen they get their hands on alive and maybe work on deprogramming them; Cam doesn't know what they'll do with them after that: not his job. 

#

When Jackson came back from the dead the first time (Cam's first time; she's been dead before, but not on his watch) he was sleeping with Sam: he broke it off (they broke it off). Now Jackson's back from the dead again (as good as dead, should have died, almost died) and this time -- while she was gone -- he didn't sleep with Sam; the two of them both knew better somehow, or maybe he's changed too much. But he feels as if he should do _something_ (now that Jackson's back): break off an affair or maybe start one _(restart one),_ so that weekend (she's back from the dead almost two weeks; the world is settling into its new orbit; his desk is more covered in paper every day) he telephones her.

"Jackson," she says. He's never heard her answer the phone any other way.

"It's, uh," -- _Cam_ \-- "Mitchell."

There's a beat of silence. "I do have Caller ID, you know."

He thinks about hanging up the phone. Because the conversation he wants to have with Jackson isn't actually one he can imagine having, and he isn't sure what it would be about, anyway. About the time he's decided to say he dialed the wrong number -- she can take it for a joke or gospel truth, just as she likes -- she says, "I'll bring beer," and the line goes dead.

She's there about an hour later; not bad time, since she lives a good forty minutes away. As she promised, she brings beer: a six-pack of hers, a six-pack of his. He offers her one, she asks for coffee instead, and Cam's just glad Jackson got him hooked on brewed coffee a while back, enough so he keeps it around for himself now. Not as good as her stuff, but he knows she'll drink it. And in the back of his mind, the conviction's growing that she's here to say it's over, because he can't remember the last time they had sex at his place. The walls are thin. He's only got a double bed. And not one he can ... tie somebody to.

And he can't decide -- thinking that -- whether he's angry (at being dumped) or relieved (that the balancing act is over) or just worried (because who the hell is going to be there to catch her now, to do the things she needs done for her?) but he doesn't have to be any of those things. Because they sit in silence on his couch, drinking coffee, and eventually she says: "You know, Mitchell, _I'm_ the one who got my brain field-stripped, so there really isn't any excuse for _you_ being this slow."

It takes a minute for the sense of what she's saying to penetrate. And when it does, he says, "So. Wanna fuck?"

"I thought you'd never ask." And she smiles, although it's at something that isn't there.

#

The ground-rules seem to have changed again. Fucking Jackson is like flying a plane. You have to pay attention _every single minute._

Not rough this time. No toys. No games (aside from the fact that just taking Jackson to bed at all is all one big war-game). He doesn't get to get her off either, and that's just confusing, because Jackson _always_ wants to get off, and when she doesn't get what she wants, the consequences can be painful. But every time he tries to touch her up -- and she's picked a position where he can't do that easily (face to face) -- she stops him. Won't let him do for her afterward, either, and if Cam didn't know her as well as he does (and it's odd to think he knows her, after thinking of her as one great big mystery for so long) he'd be thinking this was some kind of farewell performance. But if she's here, it's because she wants to be, and if he can't quite figure out what she's getting out of it, that's not entirely new. Only he's spent just about two years beating his head against _what Jackson wants_ \-- with unavoidable time-outs for her being dead and possessed and the usual run of job-related hazards -- and if what she wants is going to change this completely, he'd kind of like to know why.

He thinks about Merlin's Cave, and how she acted while she was slowly losing her mind. He wonders who she really is now that Merlin's packed up and left. If -- maybe -- Merlin took some things with him he shouldn't have. Some of _Jackson._ He'd like to come right out and ask, and it's the world's biggest bad joke that after all the things he's done to her ( _with_ her, _for_ her), there are still things that are forbidden. But there are. Lots of them.

One thing doesn't change. She won't stay.

#

Rough missions are different now. SG-1 spends most of the following week in various detention camps, trying to figure out a quick way to crack the Chosen. The situation is what Cam's daddy (out of earshot of Momma) would call _'a goatfuck of Biblical proportions.'_ There are thousands of Chosen, both the ones that came from the Ori galaxy, and the ones recruited here. Earth -- the SGC -- doesn't have the resources to feed, house, and guard thousands of Chosen. Stick 'em all on some planet together, and they'll just reinforce each others' beliefs. Keep 'em separated out, and the supply and security problems just get bigger.

By the end of the week (five days, four missions) Jackson looks ready to kill something. And if the missions are different now, the aftermath turns out to be just the same: she calls him on Saturday morning, and asks him (tells him) to come over, and he doesn't even have to wonder whether or not to bring the bag. 

#

She fights the cuffs while he's buckling them on -- not hard enough to get _away,_ but he has to work to get her into restraints. One wrist buckled up and hooked to the headboard, and then the other. "Be a good girl, now," Cam says, just loud enough for her to hear. She laughs -- a harsh bark of mockery -- and tries to curl up to get at him, but he's sitting on her by that point and her arms are secure. He puts a hand under her chin, pushing her back, and reaches for the gag.

The blood sings in his veins. He's missed this.

#

They're both satiated when he's done (fucked her, fucked her up, fucked her _over_ ). He keeps it together enough to kneel up and unhook her from the bedposts before he collapses on top of her, and of course the gag was the first thing he removed. He feels her arms come around him; she's got one hand on the back of his head, pressing his face against her neck, and he worries for a second that it wasn't _enough,_ but Jackson's never cuddly unless it's worked for her, and right now he can tell that cuddling's all she wants. He wishes -- sometimes -- this part could last longer; he wonders why it doesn't. Her lips are hot and dry as she kisses his neck, and they move against his skin as she whispers -- something -- but her voice is too soft for him to hear, and it's probably not in English anyway. He breathes in the scent of sweat and skin and his mind slides across the snapshot moments of her body jolting as if she'd been struck by lightning; the harsh silence of her waiting; and he thinks of the empty sky at the raw edge of space. No up or down. So far to fall. Like that. Like this.

#

The SGC is making noises about sending a ship through the Supergate to see what's on the other side. They're having a little luck retro-engineering the Ori tech, and they'd have more if they could actually get one of the Ori ships to Pegasus, but they can't. As soon as _Apollo_ comes off the assembly line, rumor has it General O'Neill's going to be looking for a volunteer crew for her. Going will be more of a gamble than the original Atlantis mission was. Cam knows there's a place for him on board if he wants it, but he can't make up his mind. _'The mandate of the SGC will inevitably be changing.'_ He managed to get SG-1 back together because the Ori were invading. Now the Ori have been defeated. Teal'c is spending almost all his time off trying to gather up what's left of the Jaffa and get them into some kind of order; he comes back to report what he's doing, but the day will come -- soon -- when he goes and doesn't come back. Sam's up to her ass in Ori tech, and she's making R &D noises again. She's wasted on a Field Team; Cam knows that. Especially now. _'The mandate of the SGC will inevitably be changing...'_

And Jackson isn't talking about leaving, but Cam knows she's thinking about it. He doesn't know where she's planning to go, but it really doesn't matter. _Away._

#

It's a Saturday, and he's at her apartment. They're still at the coffee-and-stilted-conversation stage, and Cam used to wonder if they were ever going to get past it, and he thinks by now he knows the answer, considering that he's been fucking the woman six ways to Sunday for about two years now.

He hears a key in her door, and he thinks that's damned odd, because he knows even Sam doesn't have keys to her place. Jackson gets to her feet and turns toward the door, still holding her cup.

The second lock slides back, and the door slides open, and General O'Neill walks in. He's in civvies. He drops his keys back in his pocket, and tosses his jacket on the nearest chair, and walks down the three steps into the living room (the ones that trip Cam as often as not) as if he's been here a thousand times. And Cam realizes: he has. O'Neill's eyes flick over Cam, registering his presence and dismissing it, and Cam doesn't even bother to come up with a reason for why he's here.

"Jack," she says, setting her cup down on the coffee table and walking over to him. Her voice always sounds so _alive_ when she talks to O'Neill, as if she can't be who she really is except with him. "I didn't know you were coming to the Springs." She stops a few feet away, because O'Neill's got both hands in his pockets and he isn't looking at her, and Jackson's the one who reads people like they were newspapers, not Cam, but even he knows there's something wrong here.

"Hank told me you'd put in your resignation," O'Neill says, looking up.

Cam sucks in a breath. Hearing the words is like a gut-punch, because she hadn't told him, hadn't told any of them, and just when the hell was she going to mention it? Or didn't she plan to say anything at all? Just vanish, and let them wonder, or maybe there'd be an email afterward, or maybe she'd mention something when they saw the airmen clearing out her office.

"Yeah, well, Ori defeated, _Goa'uld_ pretty much gone, ten years of the same-old-same-old. I figured they could do without me now. Don't you?"

It's what she'd been planning before Joe Spenser touched something he shouldn't have, Cam realizes. Why she'd been so furious when the Ori showed up. For all the best possible reasons, and for one more: Jackson'd had _plans,_ and having to save the goddamned galaxy again really got in the way.

"Yeah. Well. Dani. There's that thing about burning bridges," O'Neill says, and suddenly Cam would really like to be anywhere but here. Only the two of them are between him and the door, and the only other places to be are the kitchen and the bedroom, and if he moves at all, they might notice him.

"We burned those a long time ago, Jack," she says, and Cam wonders if she's forgotten that he's here, or if she just doesn't give a damn.

And O'Neill nods, almost imperceptibly, as if to say _'that's fair,'_ and says, "Atlantis? Or _Apollo?_ Because--"

Her back is to him, but Cam sees her shake her head. "Washington. I figured I--"

"There's nothing for you in Washington, Dani."

"There's you, Jack."

"What--" O'Neill begins, and stops, and Cam isn't quite sure what he was going to say because it didn't sound like the start of a question. "I should have said. I'm getting married. Her name's Kerry Johnson. You've met her."

He doesn't know their history. And he doesn't know Jackson -- not as a friend or (really) as a teammate -- but he knows damned well this can't be what she's expecting to hear. Cam starts moving toward them as O'Neill goes on talking about how in Washington things are different, a man needs a wife there, the kind of wife Jackson could never be, because he thinks -- irrationally, instinctively -- that something violent is about to happen and he'll need to try to stop it (as if he could). And he thinks that he's finally found out the truth he never quite wanted to know (the truth he's known for a long time): that the two of them were lovers, and he thinks (if that's true) that this is a pretty damned spiteful way to break things off. And he's known _of_ Jack O'Neill for as long -- longer -- than he's known him, and O'Neill has never struck him as a cruel man before. He can see Jackson's face, though, and she doesn't look as if somebody's shot her world down in flames (Cam knows he's never been her world).

"Two divorces, Jack? Isn't that a little excessive?" she drawls, and the scorn in her voice could draw blood. _Oh, baby, not the way to play this,_ Cam thinks, though he knows she knows O'Neill better than he ever could.

"I'm not divorcing this one," O'Neill says, and Cam realizes, hearing that, that while O'Neill may _like_ this Kerry Johnson (whoever she is), he doesn't _love_ her. Intends to marry her anyway, and stick with it. For as long as they both shall live. And be faithful to all his vows. That's implied.

But Jackson just laughs, and steps forward, and reaches out to touch him. O'Neill grabs her wrist before she can. "It's over, Dani."

Cam sees O'Neill's knuckles go white, but Jackson's face doesn't change. If anything, her expression gets a little more focused (he wonders if O'Neill knows the same things about Jackson that he does: surely he must). She starts talking to him: sing-song, not English, and Cam doesn't know any of the words, but he knows the language. _Goa'uld._ It isn't supposed to sound like this.

There's a flash of something -- too quick for Cam to catch -- across O'Neill's face, and then it goes completely blank. She switches languages, and this time it's closer to home. Farsi. Cam remembers the sound of it; bringing back memories of cold deserts and constant low-grade fear. O'Neill lets go of her wrist as if it's an effort and takes a step back. Cam can see the bracelet of red around her wrist, the struggle O'Neill has not to do anything else. She switches to English.

"Should have just set off the first bomb on schedule, Jack. Should have let them send the second one. Everyone you care about ends up dead anyway, don't they? That must be why--"

Cam knows (instinct) that he can't let her keep talking. Jackson's words can be worse than her silences: this is one of the times. He takes two long steps forward, quickly, into her space. "Down," he says, and she breaks off, turns, stares at him, incredulous, unable to believe he's saying that to her. Here. Now. And Cam can't quite believe he's saying it either -- doesn't quite know what he'll do if she refuses -- the only hold he has over her, has ever had over her, is stopping what they do, and if she's making a play for O'Neill now (planning to take up where they left off) why should she care? But all Cam knows is that she's trying to goad O'Neill into something unforgivable and he has to try to stop it. "I said 'down.' Now."

And there's a long moment of absolute silence -- two seconds, three, as he locks eyes with her and she stares at him -- and it stretches out -- five seconds, ten -- and just as Cam is thinking 'it's over,' and he's lost forever and he never realized he was playing, she turns toward him and takes a half-step and sinks to her knees -- in slow motion, like death in a movie -- and puts her arms around his leg, and rests her forehead against his thigh. And he'd like to count it as a victory, but he's not sure whose victory it is. He isn't even sure why she's done what she just did -- grace or answered prayers or self-preservation (and he knows Jackson doesn't believe in any of them) -- but he does know he can't afford to blink. He rests a hand on her head and looks back at O'Neill (whose face is unreadable), and takes a deep breath (he only gets one shot at this; it's like combat) and says: "With all due respect, sir, I don't think you can just leave things like this. Not if you love her." Cam knows O'Neill loves Jackson. The rest of it he doesn't understand. How Jackson could manage to get it so wrong. Why she thought O'Neill was waiting for her when he wasn't. 

O'Neill's eyes go distant, and Mitchell thinks he may just be watching his entire future going down in flames here, because the man is a _two-star General._ "What are you suggesting, Mitchell? A good-bye fuck?"

Everything about the sentences is harsh and ugly, but Cam's had two years' master class in looking past things like that to meaning. "Maybe I am, sir."

At his knee, Jackson doesn't even twitch. There's nothing but silence, long and heavy and charged, and Cam thinks that in spite of everything he's just heard O'Neill would probably walk through fire for the woman Cam's got kneeling at his feet. That O'Neill's probably carrying and wouldn't need it anyway and they'll never find the body and Jackson would lie her head off for him besides. Then O'Neill takes a deep breath, as if he's spent all the silence not breathing, and says: "Fine. Come on." He strides past Cam toward the bedroom, already taking off his shirt.

"Up," Cam says to her, and she gets to her feet. Staring at him. There's no expression on her face.

"You can't be serious," she says, and her voice is flat, as if she can't decide what emotion she should be showing him. It's always been deliberate between them; a chain of conscious decisions on her part. Not the way she is with O'Neill. Cam doesn't know -- now -- whether to be grateful for that or not.

"Move," he says. It ought to come out with the decisive snap of command. It's so low he can barely hear himself speak.

"I'm leaving," she says -- even though it's her apartment -- but she doesn't move. And when he takes her arm (forces himself to reach out and take her arm) and pulls her toward the bedroom, she comes without a fight.

When Cam gets them to the bedroom doorway, O'Neill is naked to the waist, ripping the blankets off the bed. Sheets and bottom sheet and mattress pad, everything goes on the floor on the far side of the bed until all that's left is the slick glistening brocade of the mattress. He leaves the pillows.

"We'll need towels," he says, and his voice is mild, conversational, matter-of-fact. Cam can't look at Jackson. He's not sure what he's going to do if she bolts now, but somebody has to get towels. He lets go of her arm and walks to the bathroom. His legs are as unsteady as if he's at the end of a five mile run. He stands in front of the towel closet, knowing he's dithering: _how many? what size?_ In the end he brings what they usually use, but twice as many: all the hand-towels she owns. There are times he wonders if she uses them for anything else but sex.

When he gets back, Jackson's standing exactly where Cam left her, and O'Neill's undressing her with slow meticulous care. The glasses have already been set aside. "At the foot," he says, and Cam sets the towels on the naked mattress. He turns to leave: he's gotten them this far, his work is done.

"Going somewhere, Mitchell?" O'Neill asks. He slides the shirt down off her shoulders; he's already unbuttoned the cuffs. She lifts her arms a little away from her body. Neither of them stops it from hitting the floor.

Cam stops, because no, he guesses he isn't, and he doesn't know why he isn't. He shakes his head slowly. "Good," O'Neill says, and peels Jackson's t-shirt up off over her head. She raises her arms so he can, and the t-shirt joins the shirt on the floor. "Get that, would you?" O'Neill says, nodding, and Cam moves around behind Jackson to unhook her bra. O'Neill lifts it off. "All gone," he says, reaching out to touch a place just below her collarbone.

"I died, Jack," she says, reminding him, and they were trying to kill each other not five minutes ago, but now they sound like what Cam knows they are. Old lovers. He can't decide whether it hurts, or how much, or whether the information's just too new and stunning to be something he can think about. Yes: in one way. And in another: he's known it all along. Jackson's been telling Cam this truth since the moment he first walked into Stargate Command. Everyone has, in one way or another: Jackson, Teal'c, Sam, even O'Neill himself. Just Cam's bad luck if he didn't know how to hear them until it was much too late.

Then O'Neill's unbuttoning and unzipping her pants, pushing them down, and she steps out of them. She's barefoot -- wasn't wearing shoes because the afternoon's plans involved Cam _fucking her senseless_ with the bag of tricks that's still sitting out beside the couch -- and she slides off her underwear and leaves it all in a pile on the floor and crawls onto the middle of the bed, claiming one of the pillows and settling in to wait. Cam stares at the fading bars of bruises down the outside of each thigh. Eight on each side, evenly-spaced, and they match, as if they're decoration. It had nearly killed Cam the first time he marked her like that; he remembers how she'd laughed. And now O'Neill is seeing them too, and Cam just doesn't want to think about that. Doesn't want to think, doesn't want to be here, doesn't have a lot of choice. Hasn't had much of that since a hot July night two years ago, not really.

O'Neill sits down on the mattress to take off his shoes, and as he does, he skewers Cam with a look. Cam realizes he's expected to take his clothes off. It's the hardest thing he's done in a long time to start unbuttoning his shirt. He focuses on that _(trying not to think),_ as O'Neill gets the rest of his own clothes off and puts them in a careful neat pile on the chair and goes over to the bed and lies down next to Jackson just as calmly as if this weren't a disaster in the making. And it's a little more awkward being the last dressed person in the room than it is being naked, so Cam gets his clothes off as fast as he can, balancing first on one foot, then the other, for the shoes. Then he's butt-naked, and there's nothing to do but get onto the mattress, and he has _no idea in God's Creation_ what's going to happen next (doesn't want to think about the fact that he made Jackson get on her knees to him out in the living room, and O'Neill saw that, and Cam still can't think what else he could have done). And O'Neill's in the middle, and there's no place for Cam to go but next to him and that adds in whole new levels of awkward, because what the hell? He would have gone around and gotten up on Jackson's side, except for the fact that there are all those blankets and bedclothes in the way on the floor there, and it would have looked awfully pointed if he walked all the way around the bed anyway. And the craziest thing of all is, neither one of them seems to be mad at the other right now (Jackson doesn't even seem to be mad at him). And Jackson? Just does not let go of a mad all that easily. Cam's still frozen there, halfway kneeling, trying to work it all through in his head -- what's going on, what's the plan -- when O'Neill sits up, and takes Cam's face in his hands, and kisses him.

There's emotion there, but Cam's just not quite sure what it is. And he's thinking: _Sweet Jesus_ even while he's reaching out to touch, because it's been one hell of a long time since he's danced this dance, and he wonders: _why here, why now?_ O'Neill's supposed to be doing Jackson, not him. And then he realizes -- he _thinks_ he realizes -- part of what's going on here (realizes that O'Neill's known all along who he is and where they met before). O'Neill's handing Jackson his career on a silver plate to do whatever she wants with it. Not Cam's so much, because Jackson's already in a position to blow that to hell. And Cam realizes -- stunned, gaping, shocked and aroused -- that _O'Neill already knows that._ And he vows to give Jackson one hell of a good show.

"Ah, just which one of us are you saying 'goodbye' to, Jack?" he hears Jackson ask. She's got that going-for-pissy tone of voice she gets when she doesn't want to let you know what she's thinking. O'Neill breaks the kiss, leaving Cam a little dizzy and more than half-hard. He's still holding Cam's face between his palms.

"Dani. You," O'Neill answers.

"Oh, good," she says. "I was starting to wonder, because I know you get confused. That's my boyfriend you're kissing. My birthday present."

"I know what I'm doing," O'Neill says, and Cam knows the words don't actually mean what they sound like, but this time he knows he doesn't have a hope of decoding them. 

O'Neill turns back, obviously intending to kiss him again, but Cam has other plans. If O'Neill wants to hand over his career to Jackson, he can hand it over all the way. Cam slides out from between O'Neill's hands, down the bed, and puts his hand around O'Neill's cock. He feels it jump in his hand, lengthen and fill out and harden. He doesn't look up, and nobody stops him when he gets his mouth over the head. He hears a faint cry -- pain, protest. Jackson. Then the scrape of body over fabric and the mattress shifts a little and he feels her hand on the back of his head. Not pushing. Just there. He sticks his tongue out and licks, and O'Neill's hips hitch up a bit, just a twitch, reflexive, and Cam feels an answering twinge in his groin, a feeling like opening up inside. It's been a long time since he's done this and he didn't think he missed it and he has.

And he hears O’Neill say: “I’ve known Mitchell for a long time,” and he feels another hand settle on the back of his head, lightly, and he realizes their fingers are touching, O’Neill’s and Jackson’s, twined together across the back of his skull, and suddenly he’s so hard that all he can do is open his jaws wide and swallow O’Neill’s cock all the way down.

Jackson says: “Did you send him to me?” and Cam concentrates on the weight and the thickness and the taste and the feel in his mouth; the scent that’s like sex but not like woman, because he knows he doesn’t want to hear the answer. But he hears it anyway.

“Not like that.”

Her hand leaves the back of his head and O'Neill's hand shifts, stroking, gentle (the only gentleness here) and he raises one knee and Cam settles himself, in for the long haul, and braces his shoulder against it. And he thinks, from the sounds (can't stop listening no matter how hard he tries) that they must be kissing.

He thinks he'll stop, has to stop, at some point, because this is supposed to be about them, about _her._ And if he gets O'Neill off, where does that leave her? But she shifts around, and her hip comes down, softly checking him, and every time he tries to draw all the way off (doesn't really want to) O'Neill's fingers tighten in his hair. Not pushing Cam down. Just making his wishes known. And Cam has one hand wrapped around the base of O'Neill's cock, the other braced on his hip (and his hand is covered now by Jackson's thigh), and the whole thing is perverse in a way Cam could never have imagined even without thinking about just whose cock he's sucking, and he thinks about Iraq, about having come full circle.

And he feels her slither up, sliding over his hand, alongside his head, and he hears O'Neill groan (what's she _doing?_ ), and the sound makes Cam feel the heavy needy weight between his own legs, but he can't get a hand free to deal with it right now. Have to wait.

He wants to make this good. For himself, for O'Neill -- hell, even for Jackson, if she's watching. So he licks and sucks and teases, taking it deep, pulling back off to run his tongue around that sensitive place just behind the head, lapping at the cockhead like a dog and then swallowing it all the way down again. Good. He wants to believe that something about this is good.

And past is present as he hears the sudden hitch and silence, and the body beneath his hands goes rigid, and flexes and arches, hips stuttering up, and his mouth and throat are filled with come, and as he swallows (trying not to cough and choke; always the same old story), his thumb traces soothing circles on the inside of the hip. Automatic. Reflex. And he realizes (should have realized a long time ago) where Jackson learned her bedtime manners. He licks and sucks until the cock in his mouth begins to soften, until the hand on his head pats gently, once. And Cam sits back on his heels, and looks up toward the top of the bed. He doesn't want to. He can't look anywhere else.

She's lying with her head on O'Neill's shoulder. He's got his arm around her. She's looking at Cam, smiling faintly; he doesn't know whether the expression is the hottest thing he's ever seen, or something that's going to give him nightmares forever. His body isn't sure either, and he puts a hand on himself, not sure at just this moment whether he wants to cover up or beat off.

But O'Neill says: "Dani," and all of a sudden she's up and moving, slithering down the bed toward him -- Cam always forgets how fast she can move when she wants to, since she spends so much of her time _refusing_ to move -- and she slides her hand under his and lifts it out of the way, and then her mouth is over his cock and when the hell did she and O'Neill _discuss_ this anyway?

She shoves into his groin with her face and he goes down on his ass, catching himself on his hands, making sure he doesn't _kick_ anybody and trying to concentrate on what the charge-list would look like if what they're doing here this afternoon ever came to trial. He can't, though. Because Jackson could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, and the fact that O'Neill's watching (watching her, watching him, watching them) makes it even hotter somehow, hitting some kink Cam didn't even know he had, and he doesn't even know whether it's the fact that he's being watched or that Jackson's following O'Neill's orders so eagerly and Sweet Jesus _God_ Cam wants to give her orders like that and get that kind of response...

This shouldn't be such a turn-on. None of it should. But it is, and it's all he can do to just hold still. Not do any of the things he wants to do, from grabbing her head and fucking her throat to pulling out and rolling her and just fucking her, and he's not really sure why he's on the menu at all. And Jackson's got both hands between his thighs, working every part of him that isn't halfway down her throat, and he does his best to be quiet but he can't keep from groaning as he comes.

She sits up as soon as she's sucked him dry, licking her lips and looking pleased with herself. He expects her to look back at O'Neill -- because that's who this is about, every bit of it -- but she doesn't. O'Neill gives him a few seconds to put himself back together before he says anything, and Cam's glad of that. Even gladder when he hears what O'Neill has to say. "How do you fuck her?" O'Neill asks, and it's a question, and it's an order, and the situation's so surreal that Cam feels like he's in a cockpit and his mask has slipped and he's drunk with lack of oxygen. It isn't really hard to answer because none of this is happening at all.

"Up the ass. With my hand. I tie her up. I gag her." He's going to go on, to say everything, but apparently O'Neill's heard enough. He glances at Jackson. 

"I don't need to tie you up, do I?" he asks.

And she answers: "No, Jack."

"Go get ready," O'Neill says, and she clambers off the bed and goes trotting off to the bathroom. "Where's the lube?" he asks, and Cam thinks of pointing at the bedside drawer (not going to mention the bag in the living room, not going to give O'Neill a chance to see what's in there) but he really can't wrap his mind around the idea of giving _General Jack O'Neill_ orders. So he moves up the bed, feeling stiff and boneless at the same time, and opens the drawer. There are two tubes there -- he always has a supply in the special bag, but Jackson believes in being prepared. He takes out the open tube and holds it in his hands, not-quite-certain what to do with it. O'Neill reaches out and takes the tube out of Cam's hands; Cam couldn't have handed it to him just then if he'd tried. Hefts it, checking to see how full it is, then sets it aside. "Got another?"

And Cam isn't sure what to say, because the automatic _yes, sir,_ is the wrong thing, so he just turns back to the drawer and pulls out the second tube, the unopened one. He offers it, mutely, thinking he ought to _get the hell out of here,_ but when he starts to shift, O'Neill looks at him and says, "You'll need to stay."

About then the toilet flushes, and Jackson comes back out of the bathroom. O'Neill gets to his feet, heading off in the direction she's just come from. He pats her on the ass as they pass; an asexual kind of locker-room pat, and that might just be the weirdest thing Cam's seen yet this afternoon.

She gets back on the bed and lies down on her stomach, stretched out, chin on her hands, staring at the headboard. And Cam can't think of what to say to her. _Is this how you were when you were lovers? Are these the things you did?_ are questions he knows she won't answer (O'Neill's the one she obeys, not him). He wants to know when it started, why it's really ending, why she didn't _know._ He wants to know why -- if they're saying goodbye -- they're saying it like this.

O'Neill comes back. "Okay," he says, and once again (always), Cam has the feeling that Jackson's hearing so much more in O'Neill's words than he is. She pulls herself to her hands and knees, taking a few moments to get herself settled and braced. Knees spread wide, arms straight, elbows locked, hands set. Head hanging. Back bowed. She looks as if she isn't here, isn't present, isn't paying attention, could stay that way forever.

O'Neill kneels between her ankles and holds out a hand. "Lube," he says, and Cam hands him the tube he's still holding. He realizes that O'Neill took off his wristwatch in the bathroom, that his hands are red from scrubbing, and when he sees those things, Cam has the first inkling of what's about to happen. He swallows hard, mouth suddenly dry (wants to see it, wants to do it, doesn't want to be here at all), wondering if Jackson knows, what she thinks.

"You ought to shave her, you know," O'Neill says conversationally, and Cam nearly chokes in the middle of inhaling. "It would make this easier."

Cam's not sure if that's the kind of remark you answer. Jackson snickers -- Cam isn't sure what his face is showing at just that moment -- and O'Neill slaps her on the hip hard enough to leave a red mark. He uncaps the tube. Takes a moment to study his hands, rubbing the tips of his fingers against each other, then squeezes a thick dollop of lube into his hand and coats the crack in her ass from the point of her tailbone all the way down to the lips of her cunt. She looks obscene, and when Cam realizes what's about to happen he wants to say: _Wait. Don't. We've never done that._

But O'Neill is already pressing at her ass with his thumb, then hooking a finger in and rocking it back and forth, and pulling back, and adding another, and Cam knows (thinks he knows) what's going to happen here, but he tells himself he doesn't. Doesn't want to be a part of it, doesn't want to watch the two of them hurt each other any more. Even though he isn't sure (not now, not any more) that's what's going on.

She's perfectly still, perfectly passive, breathing slowly and steadily, and O'Neill has three fingers up her ass now, and he picks up the lube again and squeezes more down over the backs of his fingers, stretching her, working it in to her, rocking his hand, and then he folds the little finger over onto the other three and now he's got his hand in her ass up to the bridge of his knuckles and Cam's mouth is dry and he can't look away. Couldn't look away if he was ordered to, and he needs something to do so he picks up the other tube and he's gripping it so hard his hands hurt.

O'Neill adds more lube, slicking up the back of his hand, his wrist, everything he can reach without removing the fingers he's got in her. He flicks a glance at Cam. Unreadable, but Cam feels his ears grow hot. Every time he licks his lips -- can't stop licking them -- he can taste the ghost of come in his mouth.

"Breathe," O'Neill says, and for a moment Cam thinks O'Neill's talking to him, but Jackson takes a deep breath in, and lets it out, and as she does, O'Neill folds in his thumb, and twists his wrist, and slides his hand all the way in. The only one who makes a sound is Cam.

O'Neill waits a moment, head tilted down, face so still as to be unreadable, and then slides his hand further in. Squeezes the lube over her ass, above his wrist, and Cam thinks of mustard, and hot-dog buns, and innocent summer afternoons, and clamps his teeth shut hard on the sound he doesn't want to make.

There's a squelching sound -- wet, obscene -- as O'Neill works his hand, his _fist_ , back and forth in her ass, and Cam is just starting to relax, just starting to _breathe_ , when O'Neill holds out his other hand. Cam's about to hand him the tube again -- although it's right within reach -- but O'Neill snaps his fingers. There's no sound, because they're slick with lube, but the impatience of the gesture is clear. He holds out his hand again, palm up. And Cam takes the tube in his hand, and fumbles open the cap, and pours lube into O'Neill's palm, and then realizes what he has to do (what O'Neill is going to do), and rubs it all over O'Neill's hand, palm, back, fingers, up his wrist. O'Neill makes a quiet sound of approval and Cam draws a deep shuddering breath.

And O'Neill's already in her up to the _wrist_ when he takes the fingers of his other hand and brushes them over the lips of her cunt. Cam's fingers twitch with sense-memory, of what it felt like to do that, and oh, God, O'Neill's going to _split her in two..._

But he's sliding his fingers in with the careful precision Cam associates with weapons-checks: two and three and four and thumb and hitch and twist and slide and he has both fists inside her body up to the wrists, and Cam knows, looking at the wrists, that O'Neill's knuckles are resting on each other, separated only by a thin sheath of flesh. He's not sure whether it's horrifying or erotic. Is this punishment? (And he knows what Jackson always looked for when she took him to bed; and he doesn't want to think any farther than that.) And one wrist slides deeper and the other pulls back, and Jackson makes a high soft wailing sound, almost a sigh, but there's too much voice behind it for that, and Cam would turn his head, would look at her, but he can't take his eyes away from O'Neill's hands, as they move, thrusting and pulling with frightful control and precision, as he twists his wrists, as he pulls, as he thrusts, and it's like pistons, back and forth, and no matter how much she takes, O'Neill wants her to take more, and Cam's trying to keep silent, he doesn't see how she can _take this,_ doesn't see how she can stay braced on her hands and knees that way, and her ribs are heaving, and he wants to look at her, look at her face, see if she's all right, but he can't look away from O'Neill's hands.

Her body is sheened with sweat. Not sweating outright, because she isn't moving, but the skin of her back, her thighs, her arms, shines, and Cam knows that if he put his hand anywhere on her, it would come away moist. The air is humid now, and all the sounds kept decently behind silk, behind leather, behind rubber, are out, are loud: guttural howls and yelping wails and she doesn't sound human at all; Cam thinks, with bone-chilling clarity, that this was why she never wanted him to hear her.

"Mitchell! Lube!" The snap of command cuts right through the sounds she's making, makes him jump, almost makes him drop the tube, but he's better than that and he gets it where it's needed -- over her ass, over O'Neill's wrists, both of them -- more than is needed; it pools and glistens and drips. He grabs the other tube and checks, and it's still half-full, and he only hopes to God there's enough between them, because he doesn't think O'Neill will stop.

He thinks Jackson might kill him if he stopped.

She's breathing as if she can't get a full breath, her body jerking with each inhale, with each thrust; growling and shaking her head and making those low desperate howling sounds, and Cam's panting as if he's been running, and his free hand is gripping the wrist that's holding the tube and he feels everything inside him drawn tight because he wants, he _wants..._ And this looks like brutality, but it’s not, it’s love (because O’Neill loves Jackson) and in it Cam sees the shape of what she was always asking of him -- without words, because words would be to define, to acknowledge _this._ And she couldn’t. She could only ask for what she needed -- mutely -- until the asking shaped him. But even as he thinks the words, he knows they’re wrong. She didn’t shape him. She woke what was there. It’s how he can watch this, and under the confusion, feel hunger. Feel need. The need to do this. To have this control -- to be able to give this much care. He doesn't wonder if O'Neill enjoys doing this, because he can't imagine that he wouldn't.

All of his attention is focused on where he's needed, on O'Neill's hands, on what O'Neill's doing to her, on the dull scent of the lube, the sharp musk of her body, the glistening foam on O'Neill's wrist as it slides in and out of her cunt, the delicate tight-stretched ring of pink that grasps his other wrist. The next time O'Neill doesn't have to stop, doesn't have to ask, doesn't have to tell him what to do, because Cam is there before he's summoned, and the lube cascades down over the hot, swollen, lovingly-brutalized flesh. He imagines what O'Neill is feeling, the control he has to hold her still with no more than a word. And oh, God, she's getting close now, she has to be: Cam can hear every breath she takes, the air rasping in and out of her throat; the way she gasps and chokes and coughs as she tries and fails to strangle herself to silence.

And O'Neill says one word, quietly, and her back arches, and her head comes up and back, and his hands go still inside her. And now at last Cam can look away, can look at her, can see her face, mouth open, eyes open wide and unseeing.

Silent.

Then her eyes slide closed, and she falls forward, limp, going down on one shoulder, off O'Neill's hands, and Cam is there to catch her, to brace her, to slow the fall. Her hair is soaked with sweat. She's radiating heat.

He settles her on the bed, grabs for a towel and gets it between her legs because there's lube everywhere. O'Neill sits back, and for a moment Cam thinks he's going to say something (that maybe -- now -- he'll be able to ask: why?) but then O'Neill's moving off, going to clean up, grabbing a towel along the way to wipe his hands. Cam rolls his head on his neck, rolls his shoulders, flexes his aching hands. He feels as if he's been racked.

He sits beside Jackson. She's all the way out. He's not quite sure what he feels right now. Part of it's the same strange mental-but-not-physical arousal he feels when he's done for her properly: physically tired (because it's a lot of work) and not physically aroused (because a lot of the time she's brought him off first) but still feeling like he wants to _have_ her. The other part is a quiet, crystal-clear need to be gone from here before she comes to. Go and keep on going -- somewhere, anywhere -- because she's going to ... resent ... the fact that he's been here for this. He tries to make it all make sense in his head -- why he was, why this happened the way it did -- and he can't.

O'Neill comes back. When Jackson's down like this, Cam lets her lie, leaves her to find her own way back from wherever she is; doesn't want to disturb whatever peace she's managed to find. O'Neill grabs a blanket from the jumble on the floor, lies down, selects a few pillows and settles them to his satisfaction, then gathers her onto his chest. He pulls the blanket over them and starts to rub her back, then glances at Cam, frowning slightly, and the message is clear: _settle in._ So Cam takes the last pillow and stretches out beside them and gets under the blanket too and tries to pretend that this is perfectly normal. Maybe this is what normal is now. Now that it's over he's tired enough to fall asleep, but too wired to do it. He lies there with his eyes closed anyway. Listening. And he realizes he can't separate out their breathing because they're breathing just in synch. But after a while he hears her take a deep breath. Coming back.

"Jack," she whispers. Not because she's trying not to wake him, Cam knows, but because her voice is hoarse from all that screaming earlier. "Leaving." As if it's fresh news.

"Yeah," he hears O'Neill say. And he doesn't sound angry and he doesn't sound happy. He sounds as if it's something he doesn't want to say.

Cam hears her pull in a long deep sobbing breath. Not passion now. Grief. He realizes (he's horrified to realize) that Jackson's about to cry. He hadn't thought she could. He can't sleep (can't pretend to sleep) through this; he opens his eyes and sits up. She doesn't even notice.

"I'm sorry, Jack, I'm sorry," she whispers, just before she starts to cry. After that, Cam can barely make out the words, but enough of them are clear. _I did something. What did I do? Tell me._

She's not demanding, she's _begging,_ and it hurts Cam to hear it. He can't believe anyone who loved her wouldn't answer her, but O'Neill just cradles her against his chest and strokes her hair and says "Shh-h-h," and "Nothing," and "Quiet," as if it's foolish of her to even ask. But Cam can see his face and Jackson can't, and he knows there's something, and that it's a thing so terrible that even forgiveness -- even love -- isn't enough to take that look off O'Neill's face.

He's not sure what it is (was), only that it hurts O'Neill, and that what this is about -- all of this, every bit , is about keeping Jackson from being hurt too. The military teaches you to think in terms of acceptable losses. Give up this to get that. And so Cam knows why O'Neill is marrying somebody else. Knows what O'Neill knows: that if the two of them tried to be together Jackson would do her best to tear him apart. Couldn't stop herself. She'd hate him and herself and he'd end up hating her and this is ( _that_ is: the vows O'Neill won't break, not even for Jackson) the only way to end it. Maybe they both always knew how it would go (couldn't admit how it would go) -- and never wanted it to start, and tried to end it before. Maybe they'd hoped. Cam thinks that's closer. Then O'Neill found something out. Something Jackson doesn't know. Or something she forgot. And knew they had no chance at all.

And Cam knows why _he's_ here. O'Neill needed him to meet the woman he fell in love with. Because this is _Dani,_ not Jackson (and Cam realizes she's the woman he's been chasing, the woman he thought he could turn Jackson into if he did all the right things), and maybe back in the beginning she was the only one living inside Jackson's skin. And right now it's like whatever's holding her (holding _Dani_ ) prisoner inside Jackson's head has let go for a while. Been lulled to sleep. Or bludgeoned there. And she can stop watching the shadows at the back of the cave, and walk outside, and see the sun, until it wakes up, and climbs into its chariot, and drags her back inside.

"I'm sorry," she says again. And O'Neill kisses her forehead, and says, "I know. Not your fault. Mitchell will take care of you." And now O'Neill looks at him, and speaks as if she isn’t there. "She needs someone who'll be here." _Can stand to be here,_ go the unspoken words in Cam's head. _Because she hasn't driven them away._

Cam meets O'Neill's eyes, and nods. He thinks (he knows) that Jackson (that _Dani_ ) is going to love O'Neill until the day she dies, no matter how far away that day is. "I can do that," Cam says. No _Apollo_ and no Atlantis. But this will be enough.

"Good."

O'Neill takes her face in his hands, making eye contact, speaking slowly and carefully, making sure there can be no room for misunderstanding. "We're done now." But Cam hears the unspoken words, and hopes with everything that's in him that Jackson does too. _I will always love you._

Then O'Neill gathers up all the parts of her, clinging arms and tangled legs, and sorts her out, and places her in Cam's arms. Her face is hot where it presses against his neck, as she blocks out the world she does not want to rejoin. Cam closes his arms around her by reflex. O'Neill gets out of the bed and begins to dress. He doesn't tell Cam to take care of her, because both of them know Cam will. He doesn't say 'goodbye,' because he's already said it. He dresses with quick efficiency, as if he's alone in the room. For a moment Cam thinks he'll forget his wristwatch, but he doesn't. When he gets to the doorway he stops, but he doesn't look back.

"I told Hank she'd be withdrawing her resignation," he says. Cam nods fractionally. O'Neill walks away. A few moments later, Cam hears the outer door close. He's alone with Jackson now. He strokes her back, knowing he isn't comforting her. Her breathing goes from ragged to tightly-controlled to even, and he knows she's putting her mask back on, climbing back inside her shell. He can see her bedside clock from where he lies. It's twenty minutes after O'Neill's left when she moves.

"Shower," she says, pulling away from him. Her voice is hoarse. Her eyes are swollen. Her jaw is set. She knows everything he's seen and heard, and -- obviously -- intends to endure it all by pretending none of it never happened. She moves off the bed and walks slowly and carefully toward the bathroom.

He knows she'd like him to be gone when she comes out; he doesn't think that's the right thing to do. He gets off the bed, pulls on his shorts, starts setting the room to rights. There's lube on the mattress; he scrubs at the spots with one of the towels, getting as much up as he can, and figures he'd better leave the mattress to dry before making up the bed. He folds the blanket, the bedspread, and the mattress pad, setting them on a dry part of the bed, and puts the sheets in the laundry hamper; he'll make the bed up fresh once it's dry. The shower's running, and it looks like she'll be in there a while. He goes off to the kitchen to make more coffee, stopping in the living room to retrieve their half-empty cups. 

There's a set of keys on the coffee table, next to the cups. Three keys on a split-ring, and they weren't there when he went into the bedroom. Not his. Not Jackson's. Except they _are_ hers, Cam thinks. At least, in the sense that they fit her locks. And he doesn't think she needs to see that O'Neill isn't carrying them any more, so he scoops them up and drops them into his special bag. He'll figure out what to do about them later.

He puts the cups in the sink, dumps out the old coffee, rinses the pot, makes fresh, re-fills the kettle, sets it on the stove on low heat so it doesn't boil too quickly. He's never known Jackson not to want coffee, and by now he knows how to make it the way she likes it. He also knows to cut his with plain boiling water so that it's drinkable. Goes back into the bedroom, and through the open bathroom door he can see she's just coming out of the shower. Her skin is red with heat.

He walks into the bathroom, takes down one of the big towels, and dries her gently. She doesn't ignore him, but she doesn't really acknowledge him either; she's too busy, Cam thinks, unmaking the last couple of hours in her mind, locking them up somewhere deep inside. By next week, Cam imagines, they'll both somehow have found a way to pretend today never happened. He doesn't think she'll ever mention O'Neill's name again.

All that leaves is him, and a vow he isn't quite sure yet how to keep. Cam leans forward and kisses the side of her mouth. Gently. She looks up at him, startled and puzzled but too exhausted to object. "I'll take care of you," he says. Promising.

She closes her eyes. Shakes her head slightly. She reaches out and puts a hand on his chest, pressing the tags against his skin with the heel of her hand. But the touch is gentle, and he thinks back to all the other times he's gotten gentleness from Jackson. He thinks she'd like to be able to give it more often than she does, and simply can't. He's sorry for that. Not for her. She's a casualty of war: she doesn't deserve pity, she deserves respect. "You know," she says, and finally Cam can hear all her unspoken words. _You know what I am now._

"It's all right," he says. And he knows it isn't yet. But it will be.

#

He lets himself into her apartment at a little after 2200 on a Friday night, dropping his bag by the door. A pretty ordinary week, but O'Neill's just celebrated his first anniversary (or _had_ it anyway; Cam hopes -- and means it -- that he and his wife have at least some measure of happiness) and Jackson's been pulling twenty-hour days all week. No one at the SGC with all the pieces of the puzzle (Cam isn't sure who that'd be, now that Sam and Teal'c are both gone, but there are probably one or two people) is brave enough to draw a connection -- not out loud -- and Cam's too smart.

The lights in the apartment are out, except for the ones over her workspace. The table is set at an angle to the door; Jackson glances up, sees him, goes back to what she's doing. Cam walks over to the table, reaching into his jacket pocket as he goes. When he gets there, he sets the collar on top of the pages she's reading.

It isn't anything fancy. A strip of black leather as wide as his little finger with a plain brass buckle. It's a symbol. If you really want to communicate with Jackson, you do it in symbols. He rests a hand between her shoulder blades, rubbing gently as she brings her mind back from wherever it was. When she's gotten here, she picks up the collar and gets to her feet and walks off. Neither of them says a word. Time enough for talking tomorrow, if tonight goes well.

He goes into the kitchen, pours himself a glass of sweet tea, comes back, settles on the couch, finds the remote, flips on the television (new, and she's got no use for it, but if he's going to spend this much time here, there's going to be a TV), sound muted. A few minutes later, Jackson comes walking out of the bedroom. Naked. Collared. Glasses off. She comes and settles herself the way she's supposed to: on the floor, at his knee, facing away from him, knees open, back straight, head up, hands on her thighs palms up. He sees the tension in her shoulders; she's struggling with it tonight. When she drops her chin and starts to shake her head, he reaches out -- without looking -- and hooks one finger under her collar, pulling it up snug against her throat. She gasps and comes up very straight. He lets go of the collar, but leaves his hand on her neck. Turns the sound on the TV up a notch or two.

Pain, force, domination, humiliation; he spent months unpicking the tangled threads so that he could apply each one separately. Effectively. Finding out what he can minimize, what she has to have, what works.

And what _he_ wants.

Because he _does_ want this. Wants to give what she wants (needs), for his own sake as much as for hers. He didn't know, back in the beginning -- she might have had to be the one to _show_ him -- but that doesn't make a lot of difference in the end. Now he knows. He followed her down into the dark only to discover he'd been there all along, and finding that out (having his face shoved in it, over and over), let him come out the other side. Sanity and grace. Her gift to him.

And that's another reason why he has to be (he gets to be) in charge of this. Jackson has no limits, no idea of where to stop. She wants silence inside her head, she wants _Dani_ to be able to come out -- and she wants those things so desperately she's willing to do just about anything to get them (Cam wonders just how many disasters lie in her past because of that: he can make her talk, but he can't make her tell him something she doesn't know). And he doesn't think those things will ever change, but one thing has: she trusts him to give her them to her now.

Her shoulders are still tight. He snaps his fingers to get her attention -- he's _got_ her attention, but she isn't supposed to look at him when she's at his knee and she knows it -- and when she looks over, he points. She rearranges herself, kneeling between his knees, facing him, one hand clasping the other wrist behind her back, shoulders set. He puts a hand on her shoulder and bends her forward until her forehead is pressed against his crotch. He feels her sigh deeply -- a gust of warm air -- and some of the tension goes away. Better. He goes back to watching the game, stroking her neck and shoulder absently.

He finishes his tea, decides pretty conclusively that there's no point in hanging around for the end of the game, the Tigers are going to tank (no college b-ball in this state worth talking about). He slips his hand around under her jaw, lifting her head. "Bedroom," he says.

He hasn't given her any other orders, so she rocks back on her heels -- he's always impressed at how graceful she is, no matter how long she's been on her knees -- gets to her feet, and walks off. When he follows a few minutes later -- last check, lights off, locks secure, glass rinsed and in the drainer -- she's kneeling in her proper corner. He pays no attention to her as he gets ready for bed. When he's in bed, lights out, he makes her wait a few minutes. He's made her wait longer. "Come up," he says at last. She comes across the floor on her hands and knees (again, rules that Cam has established for the times when she's wearing her collar) and climbs up into the bed.

He doesn't kiss her. Not time for that yet. It's why the beginning was such a disaster; nothing was clear. He puts her on her stomach, and he can tell from the way she rubs herself against the sheets that the sex is going to be good. They aren't scheduled for a mission for the next two weeks -- time enough, maybe, so that they can spend a few hours tomorrow really playing. But tonight they don't need anything more. He's taken her most of the way already. When he slides into her, she whimpers. "Shh-h-h," he says softly.

#

He has one hand cupped around the back of her head to keep her from thrashing, the other pressed over her cunt. Everything is slow and heavy, the way he wants it to be, and he feels her body drawing tighter as the minutes pass. Listens to her gasp and gulp back words. And when he knows it's time, he leans in even closer, breathing in the scents of sweat and leather.

"Say 'please,' baby," he whispers, his breath hot against her ear, against his face. He loves this; the intensity, the power. She's the one who taught him that. He feels her tremble all over at the sound of his voice, trying to grind herself against his fingers, to take what she needs, but he won't let her, because she needs this too. "Say it," he says, his mouth against her ear.

The click. The disconnect.

"Cameron," she gasps out. _"Please, Cameron."_ And he slips his fingers over her, against her, and she keens and shudders and comes.

He waits through it, thrust deep -- good, so good, the way he can do this for her, the way he can do this _to_ her -- and when she's done, he slides his hand up, over the smooth shaved flesh, over her stomach. Kisses the back of her neck, below the collar. This is for him now. He doesn't need to hold her down, hold her in place. He can just hold her, if he wants to. So he does. It doesn't take long, after all the foreplay, and there isn't one damned thing on his mind. Not worrying about hurting her. Not worrying if she's about to try to hurt herself. Not wondering _what she's feeling,_ or if it's okay for her. There's just sex, and it's good sex, and then he's lying against her back, holding her hand, rubbing his thumb absently in the hollow of her palm. He doesn't try to move. She still wants the weight, the touch, afterward. To be able to tell herself she's wanted, and even though it's true -- not an illusion she has to create for herself -- there's no reason to give this part up.

He knows this isn't the first time she's been wanted. He was there; he saw the proof. But taking care of Jackson isn't easy, and it isn't exactly a part-time job. And maybe it helps a little (more than a little) if it's something that _is_ a job, in one way. Something you know you have to do well. Something you can take a step back from now and then, even if it's just inside your own head,. But he promised O'Neill he'd be here, and he knows O'Neill didn't mean 'for a while.' He promised Jackson (later) that he'd never let her hurt anyone else. It was a while before he worked out the best way of keeping both those promises. A way they can both live with. Want to live with. 

He feels her sigh, and her hand moves in his. "This is not the life I wanted to have." Her voice is soft, even. Not speaking (so much) for anyone else to hear. He knows she doesn't mean that _this_ is the part she doesn't want; her fingers tighten on his. He knows she means the part where she can't have the man she loves (the other man she loves; Cam thinks she loves him a little, or _Dani_ does, anyway); the part where this is the way she has to (wants to, needs to) live. Not so much the games they play together, but the masks she wears. "I know," he says, and she pulls their clasped hands to where she can brush them with her lips, then settles them beneath her chin.

"Sleep now," he says, and feels her settle further. In the morning he'll get up and make them both breakfast, and make sure she eats. Find out something about the inside of her head, and decide what else he needs to do to make things right. See where the day takes them.

There are times when she's done for him the way he's doing for her now. Came to him when she knew he needed her, offering herself before he'd even thought of taking, and he values that for what it is: Jackson actually being willing to care. Again. Because that's what this is really about: need, and care, and keeping each other safe. They've always done that for each other, really, as much as they could. Even before they became what they are to each other now.

And if it's not quite the life he expected to have when he came to the SGC, they're both still alive, still pretty much sane, and they saved the Universe. So Cam guesses they came out ahead.

###


End file.
